In 2007, the World Health Organization (WHO) received a criticism for a lack of transparency and systematic methods in the development of guidelines, which were at that time perceived as substantially driven by expert opinion. In this paper we assessed the quality of maternal and perinatal health guidelines developed since then. We used the Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation (A...

Medical practice guidelines (GLs) being tools that are mainly designed to evaluate medical professionals, it sounds logical, and fair, that professionals should in turn evaluate GLs. Microbiology being a medical discipline, we used the AGREE instrument, i.e. an established evaluation tool for GLs, in order to evaluate the quality of two major microbiology guidelines, i.e. the SFM GLs and the AS...

Luciana Ballini, Roberto Grilli Agenzia Sanitaria Regionale Emilia-Romagna, Bologna, Italy Emails: [email protected]; [email protected] References 1 Grilli R, Magrini N, Penna A, Liberati A. Practice guidelines developed by specialty societies: the need for a critical appraisal. Lancet 2000; 355: 103–6. 2 Shaneyfelt TM, Mayo-Smith MF, Rothwangl J. Are guideline...

BACKGROUND Reporting guidelines have been available for the past 17 years since the inception of the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials statement in 1996. These guidelines were developed to improve the quality of reporting of studies in medical literature. Despite the widespread availability of these guidelines, the quality of reporting of medical literature remained suboptimal. In this...

BACKGROUND Updated guidelines for the preventive treatment of episodic migraine have been issued by the American Headache Society (AHS) and the American Academy of Neurology (AAN). We summarize key 2012 guideline recommendations and changes from previous guidelines. We review the characteristics, methods, consistency, and quality of the AHS/AAN guidelines in comparison with recently issued guid...

BACKGROUND Patient engagement in clinical practice guideline (CPG) development is recommended by multiple institutions and instruments measuring guideline quality. Approaches to engaging patients, however, vary between oversight organizations, quality tools and guideline developers. OBJECTIVE We propose a ten-step framework outlining steps and options for patient engagement in guideline devel...