Assessing the quality of standard treatment guidelines

The Cochrane Collaboration assisted the Southern African Regional Programme on Access to Medicines and Diagnostics with an Inventory of Standard Treatment Guidelines. For this project, guidelines from SADC countries on e.g. HIV, malaria, hypertension and diarrhea needed to be assessed on their methodologicalquality using the AGREE II instrument. Epi Result assisted with this, being one of the two reviewers.

SARPAM is the Southern African Regional Programme on Access to Medicines and Diagnostics. One of the studies that are currently conducted by them is an Inventory of Standard Treatment Guidelines (STGs). The objectives of the first phases of this study are: 1) to collect and catalogue all STGs across the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, and 2) to assess the quality of the different guidelines.

The Appraisal of Guidelines REsearch & Evaluation (AGREE) II instrument is used to assess the methodological quality and transparency in which the guidelines are developed. This assessment should be done by at least two independent reviewers. The South African Cochrane Centre provides one of the reviewers and they asked me to be the second one.

So in the past 2 months I have been going through guidelines on the management of HIV, malaria, diarrhoea in children, hypertension and malaria, both from the WHO and all SADC countries (if available). For each guideline the AGREE II instrument was completed, reporting on the following aspects of the guideline (6 domains): 1) Scope and purpose, 2) Stakeholder involvement, 3) Rigour of development, 4) Clarity of presentation, 5) Applicability, and 6) Editorial independence. Currently the scores of the two independent reviewers are being compared and combined to come to one score per domain. The results will be presented in a report covering all phases of the study.

Also needing a second reviewer for a similar project or for example a systematic review? Contact Epi Result.