Recommendations for Improving the Quality of Prehospital Evidence-Based Guidelines

Abstract

Evidence-based guidelines that provide recommendations for clinical care or operations are increasingly being published to inform the EMS community. The quality of evidence evaluation and methodological rigor undertaken to develop and publish these recommendations vary. This can negatively affect dissemination, education, and implementation efforts. Guideline developers and end users could be better informed by efforts across medical specialties to improve the quality of guidelines, including the use of specific criteria that have been identified within the highest quality guidelines. In this special contribution, we aim to describe the current state of published guidelines available to the EMS community informed by two recent systematic reviews of existing prehospital evidenced based guidelines (EBGs). We further aim to provide a description of key elements of EBGs, methods that can be used to assess their quality, and concrete recommendations for guideline developers to improve the quality of evidence evaluation, guideline development, and reporting. Finally, we outline six key recommendations for improving prehospital EBGs, informed by systematic reviews of prehospital guidelines performed by the Prehospital Guidelines Consortium.

Disclosure statement

This work follows from a systematic review of prehospital EBGs supported through a cooperative agreement between the National Registry of EMTs (NREMT) and the Prehospital Guidelines Consortium, with funding from NREMT. KMB, REC, CTR, and PDP received support through this cooperative agreement; CMG and ARP declare no financial support for this work. Separate from this work, CMG reports funding from CDC, NIOSH, NIH, US Department of Defense, and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals. PDP reports funding from CDC, NIOSH, NIH, and the ZOLL foundation. REC reports funding from NIH.

Additional information

Funding

The authors report no funding for this work.