Working groups update

Adaptation working group

The development, updating and implementation of clinical practice guidelines require substantial time, expertise and resources. Established guideline organisations are being asked to produce high quality guidelines more quickly and with fewer resources. Other organisations, such as hospitals or specialist societies, can be overwhelmed by expectations and requirements for creating quality tools and keeping them updated.

In response to these challenges, the ADAPTE Collaboration, an international collaboration of researchers, guideline developers, and guideline implementers has developed a generic process for guideline adaptation, consisting of the ADAPTE Manual and ADAPTE Resource Toolkit. A validation study is ongoing.

Guideline adaptation is the systematic approach to the endorsement and/or modification of a guideline(s) produced in one cultural and organizational setting for application in a different context. Adaptation may be used as an alternative to de novo guideline development, e.g., for customizing (an) existing guideline(s) to suit the local context.

Guideline adaptation recognises and responds to legitimate differences in organisational, regional or cultural circumstances that could lead to variations in recommendations supported by the same evidence.

To facilitate the dissemination of the ADAPTE process and to allow G-I-N members to get involved, ADAPTE and its resources has been transferred to G-I-N in January 2010. The high participation in the ADAPTE workshop and sessions at the G-I-N conference 2009 in Lisbon (more than eighty attendees) confirmed the interest of G-I-N members in guideline adaptation.

A G-I-N adaptation working group is currently being set up. The aims are:

• Facilitating the exchange of knowledge and experience about guideline adaptation.
• Encouraging research on guideline adaptation and evaluating its effectiveness, organisational and economic effects.
• Providing support and training to groups interested in or planning to undertake guideline adaptation.
• Refining the adaptation resource toolkit and developing additional tools.

If you are interested in participating in the activities of the adaptation working group please contact the G-I-N Office: office@g-i-n.net.

Evidence Tables Working Group

Currently, the ETWG is working on the development of two templates proposals (e.g. prognostic, economic evaluation). These proposals will be presented in the workshop scheduled at the Chicago conference in August 20010. Discussions in Chicago will help the production of a final version of these templates.

Come numerous to the workshop and discuss with us these materials as our aim is to make them fitting your needs!

The ETWG has also defined the specification for a database to store and retrieve studies evaluated using the templates already developed by the group. The G-I-N Board approved the budget for the database during its Spring meeting and the ETWG and the website developer have been working on the technical specification.