by ESO | 24.11.2017
Author: Marialuisa Zedde, MD, Arcispedale Santa Maria Nuova IRCCS, Reggio Emilia, Italy
ESO organized this workshop in Munich on November 16 2017 just before the Garmish conference.
The aim of this workshop was to detail methodological issues in guidelines production, mainly following step by step the GRADE methodology.
Both speakers and talks in the workshop were of high quality level and each talk was complete and interactive. The ability of the speakers was to make simple and easy to listen and learn some complex topics, being open to the discussion and to answer the questions from the audience.
ESO Guidelines Development Workshop, Munich, November 2017
A main feature of the workshop was that the audience is self-proposed for the event, so only very interested people from several European and extra-European countries attended the workshop. Many of them had previous experience in evidence grading and literature search for meta-analysis.
The program covered the main themes of the Guidelines production and writing, starting from the analysis of the evidence and literature search through dedicated PICO questions and continuing to the evidence interpretation and comparison, the way to solve disagreement among participants in a working group and the non-return points, i.e. the steps from which you cannot go back and change what was decided.
Guidelines production emerged as a heavy task and responsibility and each step is subject to strict control at increasing complexity levels.
Prof. Thorsten Steiner from Germany, Dr. Simona Sacco from Italy, Prof. Eivind Berge from Norway and Prof. Hanne Christensen from Denmark discussed the main steps of the Guidelines Development with a special interest in the ESO Guidelines process:
– Wording of PICO questions
– Performing systematic literature searches
– Systematic evaluation of literature searches
– Systematic evaluation of evidence of literature
– use of meta-analysis tool
– Grading the available evidence
– Grading the strength of recommendation
– Structure of a systematic recommendation
The guidelines production is a crucial activity for ESO, so the Guidelines Committee has been transformed in a Guidelines Board with a complex organization and several people have been added to share the increasing workload.
All people interested in how guidelines are produced should attend this meeting, aiming to give a contribution to the ESO activities.
