EAPC Task Force on International Collaboration for the Development of Healthcare Professional Guidelines in Palliative Care

Background

Practice guidelines are developed to collect scientific evidence and present it in a way to guide clinicians from all disciplines and professions in their daily practice to provide high quality patient care. Writing guidelines is a huge and difficult work according to a strict methodology, often beyond the capacity of a single organization. Therefore it is worthwhile investigating possible collaboration between organizations and countries in order to obtain maximum collective outcomes combining individual efforts. 

Aims & Objectives

1. To provide an overview of initiatives in palliative care guideline development across the EAPC region: in which countries, by which institutions, by which methodology are guidelines currently being developed?
2. To connect existing, and support new guideline developing initiatives through the installation of a collaborative network.
3. To develop, test and implement a methodology of guideline development focused on common pathways and shared efforts: a first part (e.g. literature search, quality appraisal and data extraction) could be part of a shared effort while a second part (e.g. writing a locally adapted guideline, piloting the guideline in the health care system) could make up for the individual effort.