PURPOSE The development and updating of high-quality clinical practice guidelines require substantial resources. Many guideline programmes throughout the world are using similar strategies to achieve similar goals, resulting in many guidelines on the same topic. One method of using resources more efficiently and avoiding unnecessary duplication of effort would be to adapt existing guidelines. T...

Current HIV policies in Tanzania have adopted the three long-term impact results of zero new infections, zero HIV deaths and zero stigma and discrimination. Strategies to reach these results include scaling-up HIV Testing and Counselling (HTC); Preventing Mother-To-Child Transmission (PMTCT); and strengthening Care and Treatment Clinic (CTC) services. Previous studies showed that HIV policy and...

BACKGROUND Appraisal of clinical guideline, especially at the national level, has two potential benefits; one is the improvement of quality of care and the second is assessing the impact of researches on an applied setting. On the other hand, Tuberculosis (TB) is a major infectious disease which has national guideline in many countries. The present study was performed to assess sources of infor...

BACKGROUND Judgments underlying guideline recommendations are seldom recorded and presented in a systematic fashion. The GRADE Evidence-to-Decision Framework (EtD) offers a transparent way to record and report guideline developers' judgments. In this paper, we report the experiences with the EtD frameworks in 15 real guideline panels. METHODS Following the guideline panel meetings, we asked m...

1.1 Purpose. This document is a guide for the development, evaluation, and review of proposed and existing practice guidelines. It is designed to promote quality and consistency in practice guideline development and to describe the criteria by which practice guidelines are evaluated and reviewed. These criteria are designed to assist in the development of guidelines that are broadly applicable ...

T here is ongoing controversy concerning the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on physicians, research publications, medical societies, and disease advocacy groups (1–7). Nowhere is the potential influence of industry more concerning than in development of clinical practice guidelines (8), which are designed to improve and standardize patient care yet also have enormous economic implicat...

BACKGROUND Research in 2007 showed that World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations were largely based on expert opinion, rarely used systematic evidence-based methods, and did not follow the organization's own "Guidelines for Guidelines". In response, the WHO established a "Guidelines Review Committee" (GRC) to implement and oversee internationally recognized standards. We examined the imp...

Clinical practice guidelines are one of the main resources for communicating evidence-based practice to health professionals. During guideline development, questions that express a knowledge gap are answered by finding relevant citations in MEDLINE and other biomedical databases. Determining citation relevance involves extensive manual review. We propose an automated method for finding relevant...

DESCRIPTION In December 2014, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) approved a joint clinical practice guideline for the management of dyslipidemia for cardiovascular disease risk reduction in adults. This synopsis summarizes the major recommendations. METHODS On 30 September 2013, the VA/DoD Evidence-Based Practice Work Group convened a joint VA/Do...