Clinical guidelines are invaluable tools in ensuring that patients receive the best available care, however there are many shortcomings associated with traditional guidelines, primarily their risk of becoming outdated as new evidence becomes available, and their inability to adapt to changes in policy and practice. Living guideline methods encompass a dynamic process of updating recommendations, context and scope, helping to overcome issues inherent in traditional guidelines by ensuring that the evidence base and supporting information remains up-to-date. Although living methods are still evolving, they have been successfully applied to many different topic areas including COVID-19, stroke and diabetes care. This webinar focused on the appropriateness of living guideline, advances in living guideline methods, their successful application to critical areas of care, and challenges in keeping a recommendation ‘living’.
Heath White is the Director of Evidence and Methods at the Australian Living Evidence Consortium, based at Cochrane Australia, Monash University. Prior to this, he was the Evidence Lead at the Australian Clinical Evidence Taskforce (formerly the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce) and the Australian Living Diabetes Guidelines program. Heath has previously worked within the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, where he contributed to the development of the ‘Guidelines for Guidelines’ program and has several years’ experience in developing systematic reviews and clinical guidelines with the Joanna Briggs Institute and the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. He is a member of the Guidelines International Network GINAHTA and GIN-ANZ Steering Committees, and co-author of the recently developed Living Guidelines handbook and associated series of papers in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, among others.
