IIB Sant Pau researchers lead the development of a new reporting tool to improve healthcare guidelines. RIGHT-Ad@pt Checklist is the new reporting tool, which ensures transparency and standardization of adapted healthcare guidelines. It facilitates the creation of recommendations that have been adapted for use in different healthcare systems.
Healthcare guidelines are evidence-based statements containing the main indications and recommendations for health professionals when facing a health problem. These guidelines use to be developed by different countries and organizations, which can be cost and time consuming. To maximize the efficiency of resources and reduce redundancy, organizations and countries may decide to adapt an existing practice guideline rather than developing a new one. But adaptation can be difficult.
A scientific workgroup developed a new reporting tool designed to improve standardization and transparency of adapted healthcare guidelines. Called RIGHT-Ad@pt Checklist, the tool focuses on improving the clarity and explicitness of recommendations that have been adapted for use in different health care systems, and of their development process. Authors at IIB Sant Pau in the Iberoamerican Cochrane Centre and the American University of Beirut, in collaboration with 119 expert researchers from 6 continents and 42 countries, describe the Checklist in an article published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
Until now, it was only available the RIGHT (Reporting Items for practice Guidelines in HealThcare) statement, which informs the reporting of the guideline development; however, it does not cover reporting of steps that are specific to guideline adaptation.
“We have now developed an extension of RIGHT to facilitate the adaptation of an existing guideline to another context, focusing on the standardization, rigor, and transparency of the process and the clarity and explicitness of adapted recommendations”, explain Laura Martínez and Pablo Alonso, lead authors and researchers from the Clinical Epidemiology and Healthcare Services group at IIB Sant Pau and Iberoamerican Cochrane Centre.
The RIGHT-Ad@pt Checklist was developed as an extension of the RIGHT statement through a multi-step process involving literature reviews and consensus building involving a range of stakeholders including guideline adaptation experts, users, journal editors, and policy makers. The checklist was designed to be used to guide the reporting of adapted guidelines, including adaptation process and the adapted recommendations. It can also be applied to assess the completeness of reporting and, in combination with available adaptation frameworks, to inform adaptation processes.
“The publication of this new tool will allow us to check how it works and how is being used by different organisations,” states Yang Song, first author of the paper and researcher at the same IIB Sant Pau group.
According to Song, future research should address the completeness of adapted guidelines and whether the publication of RIGHT-Ad@pt will have an influence on reporting, the quality of adapted guidelines, or the efficiency of the adaption process.
Authors also highlight that several audiences may use the RIGHT-Ad@pt checklist for different purposes:
Reference article
Song Y et al. A Reporting Tool for Adapted Guidelines in Health Care: The RIGHT-Ad@pt Checklist. Ann Intern Med. 2022;175. doi:10.7326/M21-4352 A https://doi.org/10.7326/M21-4352
