Guideline collaboration: strategies for consistent, trustworthy guidelines with minimal waste
Partnerships are important for developing quality guidance. When it comes to developing guidance, a broad cross section of roles, such as researchers, clinicians, patient representatives and other stakeholders, are involved. One type of guideline is a clinical practice guideline (CPG), which involves systematically developed principles and recommendations to assist in making decisions about patient care. The goal is to base CPG recommendations on the best available information, and around the world, healthcare staff use these recommendations to make patient-care decisions.
However, the process of developing CPGs is lengthy. Teams must decide on priorities and topics, gather and understand the evidence, develop recommendations, and more.
But together, we can improve the use of resources during the guideline development process. The Guideline International Network (GIN) Guidelines Collaboration Working Group is committed to making the process of working together easier. Our mission is to find and simplify ways to improve collaboration among guideline developers across the globe. Established in March 2018, the working group currently comprises 23 members across seven countries.
Forming and maintaining partnerships in guideline development is not new, nor is it rare. But, there are issues that get in the way of these opportunities. These issues include:
- lack of time and resources
- trouble establishing and managing processes for guideline development and partnership.
Our working group aims to tackle these issues, with the goal of making guideline development partnerships more successful.
Creating opportunities to work together on guideline development
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that some local public health problems have the potential to become global problems. Working together globally to address these problems is ideal, and collaboration creates new and effective solutions while sharing the burden of work. Our group wanted to understand how and why collaboration has an impact in the field of guideline development, so we carried out a needs assessment of guideline development groups in 2021. Our findings showed that collaboration paves the way for many great opportunities for guideline developers. The many benefits we observed included:
- saving resources
- providing opportunities for growth
- allowing for the inclusion of more stakeholders
- helping with knowledge exchange
- increasing motivation
- improving guideline distribution and uptake.1
We also found that well-planned partnerships between guideline developers can improve how we develop evidence-based recommendations.
What prevents collaboration?
Our needs assessment surveyed 112 unique guideline developing organisations. Collaboration among these groups was common – three quarters of participants collaborated with other individuals or organisations.1 Despite this, collaboration was often limited in scope. We wondered what challenges guideline developers were facing when it comes to collaboration? Our survey participants outlined the common challenges to forming partnerships, which included:
- time and resources needed to conduct high-quality systematic reviews and guidelines
- disagreements on guideline methods
- time needed to set up agreements to collaborate.
Understanding the issues will help our working group develop tools and resources to address some of these challenges.
A toolkit for easy collaboration
Creating a standard approach to guideline collaboration is important to ensure partnerships are successful. Our working group is developing a ‘one-stop shop’ toolkit of resources to assist guideline developers with collaboration. These will include a:
- checklist for guideline collaboration
- template for a memorandum of understanding (MOU) based on a previously published MOU2
- list of practical issues to address when starting a collaboration
- list of frequently asked questions
- guideline collaboration glossary, and more!
This toolkit, which we hope to make available in different languages, will help achieve the goal of creating a standard approach to collaboration internationally. CPGs are an important tool used across health disciplines for providing evidence-based healthcare. Working together to improve the process of guideline development not only benefits guideline developers, but can also have strong benefits for users and their patients.
Do you have any ideas for resources or tools to facilitate a successful guideline development partnership? We would love to hear them. Please share your ideas with working group co-chairs Rebecca Morgan and Toju Ogunremi by emailing [email protected]
The authors would like to acknowledge Jennifer Selkirk (Centre for Communicable Diseases and Infection Control, Public Health Agency of Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada) for her review and input.
References
1. Sultan S, Siedler MR, Morgan RL, Ogunremi T, Dahm P, Fatheree LA, et al. An international needs assessment survey of guideline developers demonstrates variability in resources and challenges to collaboration between organizations. J Gen Intern Med. 2021. Epub ahead of print.
2. Alam M, Getchius TS, Schünemann H, Amer YS, Bak A, Fatheree LA, et al. Guidelines International Network (GIN) Guidelines Collaboration Working Group. A memorandum of understanding has facilitated guideline development involving collaborating groups. J Clin Epidemiol. 2022;144:8-15.
Authors
Amanda Graham1, Lucia Kantorova2, Toju Ogunremi1, Rebecca L Morgan3.
1. Centre for Communicable Diseases and Infection Control, Public Health Agency of Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada
2. Czech National Centre for Evidence-Based Healthcare and Knowledge Translation, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
3. Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada
On behalf of the Guideline International Network (GIN) Guidelines Collaboration Working Group
Disclaimer
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