While several checklists for the development and appraisal of specific guidelines had been developed by 2014, there had yet to be published a thorough and systematic resource for organizations to inform the actual day-to-day operations of a guideline development program. Noticing this need, Schünemann and colleagues pooled their professional experiences and contacts in the field in addition to conducting a systematic search for self-styled “guidelines for guidelines” and other guideline development handbooks, manuals, and protocols. The reviewers, in duplicate, extracted the key stages and processes of guideline development from each of these documents, compiling them together.
The result was the G-I-N/McMaster Guideline Development Checklist: an 18-topic, 146-item soup-to-nuts comprehensive manual spanning each part and process of a guideline development program, from budgeting and planning for a program to the development of actual guidelines to their dissemination, implementation, evaluation, and updating.
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| An overview of the steps and parties involved in the G-I-N/McMaster guideline development checklist. Click to enlarge. |
The checklist also provides hyperlinks to tried-and-true online resources for many of these aspects, such as tips for funding a guideline program, tools for project management, topic selection criteria, and guides for patient and caregiver representatives.
Manuscript available for free here.
