Costing program implementation using systematic reviews: interventions for the prevention of adolescent depression

Systematic reviews can provide up-to-date syntheses of reliable evidence on "what works" to help policymakers, practitioners, and people who use services make well-informed decisions about social and behavioral interventions. However, systematic reviews of social and behavioral interventions do not typically include evidence on resource use and costs, critical dimensions for decision makers to consider when faced with limited resources and constrained budgets. This paper builds on existing recommendations for including evidence for resource use and costs in systematic reviews by illustrating the development and use of an instrument to code resource use and cost data from an existing systematic review on the effects of adolescent depression prevention programs and applying that instrument to 46 studies included in that review. We demonstrate that resource use and cost data are relatively sparsely reported for treatment conditions in reports of included studies and even more so for comparison conditions, although the reporting of the most important cost drivers is reasonably frequent for treatment conditions. To allow for better integration of resource use and cost data into systematic reviews, future studies that aim to inform decision making should report more detail about program resource use and costs required for implementation, perhaps using the template provided in this paper. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.