E-Mail to the leading physicians of German ICUs. Original translated from German:

Dear Colleagues,

to meet the challenge of the current Corona pandemic, 21 universities and 4 non-university partners have joined together to form an interdisciplinary consortium within the CEOsys collaborative project (COVID-19 Evidence Ecosystem to Improve Knowledge Management and Translation).

The aim of this consortium is to review scientific findings on COVID-19 pandemic management as quickly as possible in a quality-assured and independent manner for relevance and to make them available as updated overviews of results (“living evidence syntheses”).

The task of the intensive care physicians involved in this project (signatories) is to align these evidence syntheses with the pressing issues of their daily work and then to prepare and present them oriented to the specific preferences regarding information channel and format of the different target groups (nursing and medical intensive care staff) to achieve the broadest possible implementation of the generated knowledge.

For us to jointly achieve the goal of providing the best possible care for COVID-19 patients *, we ask that you.

1. As the medical director of your ICU, to complete the survey once per ICU (you can indicate your management function in the initial question), so that we can prioritize the topics of the evidence syntheses based on the structural data on current treatment standards in German ICUs in a way that is as demand-oriented as possible. During the survey, you have the option to voluntarily provide contact information. By participating in this structural data collection, we have the possibility to name you as a cooperation partner in a corresponding publication and to contact you regarding future participation in follow-up projects.

2. To forward the survey link as widely as possible to your intensive care staff (medical, nursing and other assisting staff) in your own hospital, so that we can take group-specific barriers and needs into account when imparting knowledge on the subject of intensive care medicine. In this survey, there is no possibility on our part to link the answers given here with those of the medical management!

3. Finally, we would like to ask you to forward this mail including the survey link to non-university hospitals in your catchment area to generate as comprehensive a data pool as possible.

The survey will take approximately 6-8 min to complete.

It is an anonymous data collection, conclusions on clinic or person or the linking of submitted answers (e.g., medical management with intensive care staff) are not possible!

The Intensive Care COVID-19 Treatment: Standards of Care and Individual Preferences in Knowledge Transfer survey is launched with the following link: https://www.soscisurvey.de/covid-evidenz1/?q=ITS (survey now offline)

(Survey period up to and including 31 December 2020).

We sincerely thank you in advance for your valued support!

With collegial regards,

for the working groups AP6, AP7 and TF3 of the CEOsys:

the CEOsys coordination in Freiburg (Prof. Dr. Jörg Meerpohl)

the Clinics of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine of the University Hospitals of

Würzburg (Prof. Dr. med. Patrick Meybohm, Prof. Dr. med. Peter Kranke, Maria Popp),

Leipzig (Priv.-Doz. Dr. med. habil. Sven Laudi, Falk Fichtner, MD, and Christian Seeber, MD),

Göttingen (Prof. Dr. med. Onnen Mörer, Dr. med. Steffen Dickel and Clemens Grimm),

And the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI).

For more information, please visit:

https://www.netzwerk-universitaetsmedizin.de/projekte/ceo-sys (accessed on 28 July 2021).

http://covid-evidenz.de/ (accessed on 28 July 2021)

Results of the online survey. Data in absolute number or mean value ± standard deviation. The original questions were asked in German. English translations are shown here. (*) for questions with multiple answers possible.