Adapting the procedures of a hospital guidelines committee to International standards

Article type
Authors
Selva Olid A1, Carolina Silva D2, Santafè M1, Rego A3, Pubill J1, Navarro G4, Mas L1, López P2, Herrera M1, Gual M1, González M1, García A1, García R1, de Castro M1, Cufí M1, Augé A1, Solà Arnau I
1Corporació Sanitaria Parc Taulí, I3PT-CERCA, Sabadell, Catalonia, Spain
2Corporació Sanitaria Parc Taulí, I3PT-CERCA, Sabadell, Catalonia, Spain; Institut d'Investigació i Innovació Parc Taulí, Sabadell, Catalonia, Spain
3Institut d'Investigació i Innovació Parc Taulí, Sabadell, Catalonia, Spain
4Corporació Sanitaria Parc Taulí, I3PT-CERCA, Sabadell, Catalonia, Spain; Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain; Institut d'Investigació i Innovació Parc Taulí, Sabadell, Catalonia, Spain
Abstract
"Background
Health professionals and patients need tools to help them in health decision-making. These tools (guidelines, protocols, procedures) should to be trustworthy, evidence based and locally adapted to guarantee the best care for patients. It is a requirement that hospitals have context-adapted and updated decision-making tools for the most prevalent conditions.
Objectives
To describe the actions conducted by the Guidelines Committee of a hospital to update its procedures following international standards for guidelines.
Methods
The Guidelines Committee of Parc Taulí Hospital was created in 2001 and has the function of regulate, promote and evaluate tools for decision support developed and adapted to our hospital context. From November 22, the Committee started a process of in-depth review of procedures and has taken actions to update them: 1) Review and guarantee of multidisciplinarity of the Committee; 2) Development of a template for help decision-making tools (guidelines, protocols and procedures) based on the RIGHT, the RIGHT-Ad@pt and the Guidelines 2.0 checklists; 3) Development of instructions and examples to help professionals in the development of tools, 4) Create an assessment tool based on AGREE-II to be used by the Committee to assess help decision-making tools developed in the hospital; 5) Review the validity of available help decision-making tools and start a process for updating the obsolete ones.
Results
The composition of the Committe has included new professionals to guarantee multidisciplinarity: 15 health professionals from diferent disciplines and areas and a secretary. The Committe has created an institutional template for guidelines and protocols and a template for the development of procedures. These templates come with a “filled template” with instructions and examples of what is expected to be explained in each section. The Committe has reached consensus on a set of items from AGREE II to be used in the assessment of guidelines, protocols and procedures. The Committe has identified 109/203(54%) not current tools and has promoted the updating of 42 (38%) of them.
Conclusions
The Guidelines Committee has updated and improved some of its procedures, enhancing the quality of hospital guidelines to offer improved health care to patients.
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