gms | German Medical Science

Objective:Despite much effort to put into adapting clinical guidelines, the quality of clinical guidelines varies considerably. But there are no specific instruments to assess the quality of adapted clinical guidelines. The purpose of this study was to develop instrument for quality assessment of adapted guidelines and to test validity and reliability of the instrument for implementation

Method: We reviewed literature related to the quality of clinical guidelines and characteristics of the adaptation process. 23 items describing suggested predictors of adapted clinical guideline quality were grouped into 5 dimensions covering planning, the rigor of adaptation, presentation of recommendation, dissemination and implementation and ethics, We call this tool Quality Assessment of Adapted guidelines (QUADG). We conducted comprehensive search for guideline specific databases to identify adapted clinical guidelines. 34 adapted clinical guidelines were selected. We are in the process of evaluating reliability and validity of this instrument with 9 appraisers. Reliability could be assessed in two ways; internal consistency and inter rater agreement. Evidence of criterion validity will be measured by calculating Pearson's correlation co-efficiencies between appraisers dimension scores and their global assessment of a guideline. We predicted that dimension scores for supported guidelines are higher than those for guidelines that were developed by academic societies. In an attempt to investigate validity further, analysis of variance (ANOVA) will be used to test this hypothesis.

Conclusion: Although this study is still in progress, we are hopeful that this tool can be useful for the evaluation of adapted clinical guidelines.