Date of Graduation

Fall 12-16-2016

Document Access

Project/Capstone - Global access

Degree Name

Master of Public Health (MPH)

College/School

School of Nursing and Health Professions

Abstract

Environmental health systematic reviews have long been of poor quality when comparing them to clinical health systematic reviews. The main reason for the poor quality of environmental health systematic reviews is the lack of a specific protocol. The University of California-San Francisco’s Program for Reproductive Health and the Environment has, because of the discrepancy, created a protocol specific to conducting environmental health systematic reviews. The protocols efforts would be futile without a nonbiased way to evaluate systematic reviews and therefore the protocol used. The Literature Review Appraisal Toolkit is a valuable tool created to navigate and evaluate the credibility of current published environmental health systematic reviews. The LRAT was applied to multiple published systematic reviews that focused on three different topics that PHRE was focusing on. The results of the LRAT are for each case study show the majority of published environmental health systematic reviews to be unsatisfactory and all of them not following an outlined protocol. The continual use of a tool to rate environmental health systematic reviews will be necessary just as the application of strict protocols will be necessary. The current standard for environmental health systematic reviews is very low and demanding better quality is necessary to make environmental health systematic reviews useful to the medical field and transparent for decision-making and policy development.

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