Methods for living guidelines: early guidance based on practical experience. Paper 3: selecting and prioritizing questions for living guidelines

Abstract

Objectives

This article is part of a series on methods for living guidelines, consolidating practical experiences from developing living guidelines. It focuses on methods for identification, selection, and prioritization of clinical questions for a living approach to guideline development.

Study Design and Setting

Members of the Australian Living Evidence Consortium, the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence and the US Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations Network, convened a working group. All members have expertize and practical experience in the development of living guidelines. We collated methods, documents on prioritization from each organization's living guidelines, conducted interviews and held working group discussions. We consolidated these to form best practice principles which were then edited and agreed on by the working group members.

Results

We developed best practice principles for (1) identification, (2) selection, and (3) prioritization, of questions for a living approach to guideline development. Several different strategies for undertaking prioritizing questions are explored.

Conclusion

The article provides guidance for prioritizing questions in living guidelines. Subsequent articles in this series explore consumer involvement, search decisions, and methods decisions that are appropriate for questions with different priority levels.

Read the full publication here:

https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(22)00346-8/fulltext

Authors:

Saskia Cheyne, David Fraile Navarro, Amanda K. Buttery, Samantha Chakraborty, Olivia Crane, Kelvin Hill, Emma McFarlane, Rebecca L. Morgan, Reem A. Mustafa, Alex Poole, David Tunnicliffe, Joshua P. Vogel, Heath White, Samuel Whittle, Tari Turner