This draft instrument has been developed by an international group of researchers and is currently being tested.
Instrument is to provide a framework for assessing the quality of clinical practice guidelines.
By quality we mean the confidence that the potential biases of guideline development have been addressed adequately and that the recommendations are both internally and externally valid, and feasible for practice. This process involves taking into account the benefits and costs of the recommendations, as well as the ethical and practical issues attached to them. Therefore the assessment includes judgements about the methods used for developing the guidelines, the content of the final recommendations, and the factors linked to their uptake. It provides a prospective assessment of the validity of a guideline, that is the likelihood that it will achieve its intended outcome. It does not include outcome measurements on the impact of a guideline on the process of care or patients outcomes.