Dissemination of living guidelines to consumers / patients

Clinical practice guidelines provide evidence-based recommendations to inform healthcare decision making and optimise patient care. The primary audience for guidelines is clinicians, however some healthcare consumers (patients and community members) also want to use guidelines to inform their healthcare decisions. We know the ways in which consumers would like to receive this information (plain language, multi-media etc) but guideline developers rarely produce patient versions of their guidelines, and when they do, it often does not meet consumers’ health information needs. In this project, we would like to understand more about the barriers and enablers to producing and disseminating patient versions of guidelines, and how they might apply to living guidelines (i.e. guidelines that are continually updated). The methods could include interviews, surveys, workshops with a range of different participant groups. The project will have real-world application, with the results directly informing dissemination strategies for the Australian Living Evidence Collaboration’s current and future guidelines. The Australian Living Evidence Collaboration, within Cochrane Australia, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, is a world-first initiative that brings together leading experts in evidence synthesis, guideline development and digital technologies to build a next generation system for delivering reliable, accessible, up-to-date evidence in health. You will be supervised by highly experienced researchers from ALEC, and welcomed into the ALEC team.