Researchers hope that a comprehensive new checklist will help guideline developers/organizations around the world create and implement better recommendations for health care. The guideline development checklist, created by an international team of researchers, is published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

This new checklist aims to fill the need for practical steps, tools and resources to help guideline developers create high-quality health care guidelines. Currently, there are many tools to evaluate guidelines, but there is a dearth of practical information for creating guidelines.

"Our objective was to systematically compile a comprehensive checklist of items and a portal for related resources that guidelines developers, both newcomers and experts, could consider for all stages of the guideline enterprise," writes Dr. Holger Schünemann, Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, with coauthors.

The checklist includes 18 topics and 146 items with links to resources and training materials that include every stage in guideline development from planning to practice with the aim of being updated through crowdsourcing.

"The checklist is intended for use by guideline developers to plan and track the process of guideline development and to help the developers ensure that no key steps are missed," write the authors.