Protocol for the development of a clinical practice guideline for discharge planning of stroke patients

A standardized discharge plan is important to continuous medical care and discharge management of stroke patients. Currently, there is a lack of high-quality, evidence-based discharge planning guidelines for stroke patients. Most existing discharge planning guidelines have been developed for other diseases and stroke-related guidelines focus more on prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation and less on discharge planning. Therefore, they do not provide a systematic and comprehensive answer to the key issues of discharge planning for stroke patients. To improve the level of recovery and quality of life of stroke patients, to better guide clinical caregivers in developing and implementing discharge plans, the Evidence-based Nursing Center of West China Hospital, Sichuan University and the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Guideline Implementation and Knowledge Translation have jointly initiated the development of the clinical practice guideline for discharge planning of patients with stroke.

The guideline development process is designed to follow the WHO handbook for guideline development and Guidelines 2.0. Evidence grading and guideline recommendations are based on the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE). The key steps in developing the guideline include: (I) establishing the guideline working groups; (II) selecting the priority clinical questions; (III) evidence retrieval and evaluation; (IV) grading the quality of evidence; (V) forming recommendations; and (VI) external review.

This guideline will follow the clinical characteristics and management priorities of stroke and will be developed by a multidisciplinary guideline development team, in strict accordance with the core principles and methods of guideline development. This guideline will provide an evidence-based reference for standardized discharge screening, assessment, discharge procedures, and outpatient follow up, so as to improve the quality of discharge services and standardize the discharge management of stroke patients, and ultimately improve their post-discharge rehabilitation and quality of life.

The guideline was registered at the Practice guidelines REgistration for transPAREncy. The registration No. is IPGRP-2022CN331.