A new paper published in PLOS Medicine this week describes an innovative and transparent approach for assessing how much confidence to place in findings from qualitative evidence syntheses.

The new approach, known as CERQual (‘Confidence in the Evidence from Reviews of Qualitative research’), is designed to help decision makers use qualitative evidence for decisions and policies about healthcare and social welfare.

Simon Lewin, from the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services, Norway, and lead author of the new paper, notes that “the use of CERQual can help the authors of qualitative evidence syntheses to consider, analyse, and report review findings in a much more useful and usable way. CERQual can help decision makers and other users understand how much confidence to place in findings from qualitative evidence syntheses. This will assist them in judging how much emphasis to give to these findings when they’re making their decisions.”

CERQual is being developed by a subgroup of the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) Working Group (www.gradeworkinggroup.org), with funding from the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, Cochrane, Norad and WHO.

The CERQual paper is now freely available on the PLOS Medicine website at http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001895