Grant: Project Grant

Clinical practice and public health guidelines help guide decisions in healthcare, policymaking, and resource allocation. However, keeping these guidelines up-to-date and trustworthy is a challenge. Living guidelines are a new type of guideline that aims to tackle this challenge by continuously updating guidelines with the latest evidence. The literature on how to conduct a living guideline is rapidly growing, but there remain gaps in understanding how users perceive and implement living guidelines and in evaluating their quality. This research program has two main goals: 1. Analysis of Guideline Users' Perspectives: First, we seek to understand the perspectives of guideline users, including clinicians, policymakers, and patients, on the barriers and facilitators of living guidelines and their preferences for using them. We will conduct focus groups with guideline users to explore their understanding of living guidelines, their experiences in using them, and their suggestions for improvement. 2. Development of an Appraisal Tool: Second, we aim to develop an evaluation strategy, building on the AGREE II tool, to assess the unique aspects of living guidelines. We will identify quality concepts related to living guidelines through focus groups and ongoing reviews. These concepts will be transformed into evaluation items and refined through feedback from guideline developers and users. The resulting tool will be tested and refined further to produce a final version, AGREE Living Guideline appraisal tool. The research team is comprised of experts from various disciplines/perspectives and jurisdictions, including guideline development, methodology, and guideline user communities, ensuring a comprehensive and diverse perspective. The expected outcomes of this project include an internationally recognized appraisal strategy for assessing the quality of living guidelines. This will help improve the development and reporting of guidelines, and benefit users worldwide.