Czech national project 'Clinical Practice Guidelines' methodology and current results.

Abstract

Currently in the Czech Republic, there does not exist such an institution as a 'National Centre for Clinical Practice Guidelines'. In 2017, there were about 123 professional medical organizations which developed about 1909 'guidelines' until 2017. However, the majority of these guidelines are 'expert opinion' or 'consensual' based 'guidance' or rather recommendations in the most cases missing a systematic approach that reflects evidence-based medicine principles and methods. The project is led by the Czech Health Research Council, the first partner is the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic and the second partner is the Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic with support from policy makers, academics, clinicians and members of the Czech National Centre for Evidence-Based Healthcare and Knowledge Translations. This centre is an umbrella for three very important international collaborations which play a key role in Evidence-Based Healthcare, Evidence Synthesis, Evidence Implementation and trustworthy guidelines development. These are Cochrane Czech Republic, Masaryk University Grade Centre and the Czech Republic Centre for Evidence-Based Healthcare: The Joanna Briggs Institute Centre of Excellence.The main aim of this article is to present the Czech National Methodology of the Trustworthy Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG) development and the first results of the project 'Clinical Practice Guidelines'.A pilot phase of the project was realized during the first year of the project from January to December 2018. As the first step, there were established managing authorities including a Guarantee Committee and an Appraisal (Methodological) Committee. The Members of the Appraisal Committee developed a pilot version of the National Methodology of CPG development based on the best available approaches to Trustworthy CPGs development followed by testing on the first five pilot CPGs.