Standardised operating procedures for recommendations in the field of physical and rehabilitation medicine

There is an outstanding increased demand for recommendations in the rehabilitation field. Over 600 recommendation articles have been published in the last decade, primarily by groups of authors based on unclear criteria and only a few by learned societies based on standardized methods.

In 2007, the French Society of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (SOFMER) published a methodology to establish recommendations in physical and rehabilitation medicine (PRM). This framework, which served to publish 22 sets of management recommendations, must be reworked to meet new international methods for elaborating recommendations. Therefore, our objectives were: 1) to elaborate an updated methodology to enhance the dissemination and implementation of SOFMER-endorsed recommendations, and 2) to standardize and report in sufficient detail the successive steps from the elaboration of these recommendations to the evaluation of their impact and provide supporting tools to guide developers.

At the SOFMER's request, a steering committee assembled, consisting of 7 PRM senior physicians with experience in elaborating, disseminating, implementing and/or evaluating recommendations in the field of PRM. They conducted a non-systematic literature review to identify methodologies and standardized operating procedures previously published by scientific societies in France and overseas. Available information regarding strategies for elaboration, dissemination, implementation and evaluation of the recommendations, scientific valorization and business models was retrieved. Participants in previous recommendations were also interviewed regardless of their field.

We identified 4 common key steps: preparation, elaboration, valorization and evaluation, usually scheduled according to an 18- to 24-month timetable. We divided these 4 steps into 9 sub-steps, each of which was standardized and described in detail. The steering committee also elaborated a specific editorial process for publishing recommendations.

This novel SOFMER methodology was designed to draw up high-level recommendations for the field of PRM and, more generally, for rehabilitation practices, facilitating their implementation. Standardization of operating procedures should provide guidance to authors to achieve replicable and high-quality recommendations.