Rationale
Guidelines have been collected, from organisations world-wide to complement the European breast cancer guidelines developed for screening and diagnosis. They cover the remaining care processes, such as: treatment, rehabilitation, follow-up, survivorship and palliative care. These guidelines have been furthermore used to inform the ECIBC quality assurance scheme for the definition of quality requirements and indicators.
Aim
These guidelines are made accessible in the form of an online catalogue on this website. Their structured dissemination through a single access point shall contribute to the improvement of the quality of breast cancer care.
Approach
The guidelines listed have been retrieved in 2016 through an open call for guidelines and bibliographic searches performed using available medical and guideline databases and stakeholders' websites initially until 2016. An update was performed in September 2019. The guidelines were selected using specific eligibility criteria.
These criteria provide a clear distinction between trustworthy clinical practice guidelines and other forms of clinical guidance, such as consensus statements and expert advice. Guidelines not fulfilling the criteria for trustworthy clinical practice guidelines are not included in the catalogue.
The guidelines identified though searches and those submitted by different stakeholder organisations through the open call were evaluated for compliance with the eligibility criteria and for their quality. The instrument used to differentiate the quality of clinical practice guidelines is the Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation (AGREE) II tool.
All the guidelines meeting the eligibility criteria were assessed with AGREE II tool. The scores are available upon request.
Next steps
The catalogue will be periodically updated.
Definition
Trustworthy clinical practice guidelines: According to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), guidelines are considered trustworthy when they are:
- based on a systematic review of existing evidence
- developed by a knowledgeable, multidisciplinary panel of experts and representatives from key affected groups
- attentive to important patient subgroups and patient preferences
- based on an explicit and transparent process that minimises distortions, biases and conflicts of interest
- clear in their explanation of the logical relationships between alternative care options and health outcomes
- rated in terms of both the quality of evidence and the strength of the recommendations
- reconsidered and revised as appropriate when important new evidence warrants modifications of the recommendations.
(Source: Institute of Medicine, Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can Trust, The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, United States, 2011).