Creating a toolkit for trustworthy guideline development and implementation

Health guidelines and recommendations are developed to provide advice to healthcare providers, program managers, policy makers and the public to make optimal healthcare decisions. Various Canadian and international organizations constantly seek to apply the latest and best practices in their guideline production. Resources such as the GIN-McMaster Guideline Development Checklist, the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations (GRADE) Approach Handbook, and many others are highly cited and frequently used by guideline developers to produce rigorous and trustworthy guidelines. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that guideline developers do not use the existing tools in optimal ways, in part because they are not easily accessible and sometimes outdated. The objectives of this project are to update the GIN-McMaster Guideline Development Checklist and develop an extension for guidelines developed in a pandemic, update the GRADE Handbook, and identify and catalogue available tools and resources for guideline development in a new interactive, web-based Guideline Development Toolkit. We plan to conduct systematic reviews and involve experts in consensus exercises and authoring of the updated Checklist and Handbook. We will develop and maintain a self-serve web portal for guideline developers to access latest methodology, tools, and resources. Use of the Guideline Development Toolkit will serve to ensure rigour in guideline development and, consequently, trust in guidelines by healthcare professionals and the public.