Guideline organizations' guidance documents paper 9: co-operative approaches

Collaboration allows participants to share and leverage their strengths, mitigating resource limitations and duplication of efforts. Guideline-producing organizations interested in collaboration have developed policies to engage in collaborative effort. Our objective was to describe co-operative approaches to practice guideline development used by guideline-producing organizations as described in their guidance documents.

We conducted a systematic search to identify publicly available guidance documents from guideline-producing organizations. Two authors assessed eligibility and abstracted data on the organizations' characteristics and their policies for co-operative approaches in guideline development. Regarding key concepts in guideline development, co-operative approaches refer to collaborative efforts among different guideline-producing organizations to ensure the production of comprehensive practice guidelines. Collaboration involves a co-operative and co-ordinated effort between guideline-producing organizations, wherein multiple entities contribute to and engage in guideline development. Endorsement refers to the formal approval of practice guidelines by external entities, indicating their agreement or validation of the proposed guidelines. We distinguished between two perspectives of endorsement: i) Endorser: Organization X endorses guidelines established by an external organization. ii) Endorsee: External organizations endorse guidelines established by Organization X. We prespecified a list of co-operation components based on findings from a systematic review on health research collaboration by academic entities. Additionally, we accommodated any emerging components identified from the data. Subsequently, we abstracted data related to these components. Our study excludes intraorganizational or interteam co-operation. We analyzed categorical variables using frequencies and percentages and summarized the findings in textual, graphical, and tabular formats.

Of the 133 identified guideline-producing organizations that described their methods in a publicly available guidance document, 73 (55%) organizations described at least one co-operative approach (N = 59), classified as "collaboration" and (N = 41) as "endorsement." The most frequently addressed components for collaboration include dissemination plan (50%), team structure and governance (48%), conditions for co-operation and authority for decision to co-operate (42%), and conflict of interest policy (32%). The least addressed components include division of labor (2%), communication plan (2%), and writing (2%). Many components, such as sharing resources, shared benefits, and protocol development plan, were not addressed at all. Components of the endorsement approach varied depending on whether the perspective was an endorser or an endorsee organization.

The most commonly described component for collaboration was dissemination plans. For endorsement, conditions for co-operation were most frequently addressed. Many important components were either insufficient or not covered.