Turner et al. BMC Public Health 2010, 10:170 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/10/170 publicly available. We chose to focus on the health issues surrounding crisis situations, however we acknowledge that these situations also involve environ- mental, engineering and social problems. Our focus was on health issues as this our area of expertise and this is also the area in which the methods for developing clini- cal practice guidelines have been established. The study is also limited to assessing the reviews that are available at the current time, which may be different from those available at the time the guidelines were developed, which was not always clear from the guidelines. How- ever the included guidelines were all developed relatively recently, and this study highlights that there is evidence relevant to this area of clinical practice that could be used as the basis of future guideline development. Conclusion We were unable to identify any explicitly evidence-based guidelines to support decision-making around perinatal and child health care in disaster settings. We found that there are many Cochrane reviews available that have the potential to contribute to the evidence-base supporting guidelines for perinatal and child health in disaster settings in the future, and that most of these reviews include some studies conducted in developing settings. However there are also important issues to be addressed in terms of the relevance of the available reviews and increasing the num- ber of reviews addressing questions of health care delivery. Additional file 1: Table S1. Details of potentially relevant Cochrane systematic reviews and protocols for each guideline Acknowledgements Our thanks to Sally Green, Claire Harris and Katrina Williams for comments during the development of this research and drafts of this article. Funding This study was funded through an Australian Postgraduate Award provided by the Australian Federal Government. Internal support was provided by the Centre for Clinical Effectiveness, Southern Health and Monash Institute of Health Services Research, Monash University. Author details 1Monash Institute of Health Services Research, Monash University, Locked Bag 29, Clayton 3168 Australia. 2Centre for Clinical Effectiveness, Southern Health, Locked Bag 29, Clayton 3168 Australia. 3previously of the Australasian Cochrane Centre, Monash University, Locked Bag 29, Clayton 3168 Australia. Authors’ contributions TT conceived of this project and developed the methodology and data extraction approach, which HB, JR and MG refined. TT and MG undertook the searches. TT, HB, JR and MG applied the AGREE criteria. TT undertook the data extraction with assistance from HB and JR. TT prepared the first draft of this article which HB, JR, MG and TT then revised. TT had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication. All authors read and approved the final manuscript Competing interests TT undertook a PhD supervised by the Director of the Australasian Cochrane Centre (ACC) which included an evaluation of Evidence Aid, funded through Page 7 of 12 a grant from The Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group Discretionary Fund. HB was previously employed by the ACC. JR and MG both work on projects, unrelated to this project, in which ACC is a collaborator. Received: 3 June 2009 Accepted: 29 March 2010 Published: 29 March 2010 References 1. Moss WJ, Ramakrishnan M, Storms D, Henderson Siegle A, Weiss WM, Lejnev I, Muhe L: Child health in complex emergencies. Bull World Health Organ 2006, 84:58-64. 2. Oxman A, Lavis J, Fretheim A: Use of evidence in WHO recommendations. The Lancet 2007, 369:1883-1889. 3. 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