The College’s NICE-accredited guideline development program involves updating and developing clinical guidelines across the different specialties. Our clinical guidelines are important resources for members, providing data on best clinical practice and ensuring a high standard of care for patients. As such, we continually review the program to improve our service to members.
In February 2020, we asked our members how they use our guidelines, how we can help them implement them and areas for improvement. The results were analysed by our Working Group for Cancer Services (WGCS) and Clinical Effectiveness team and several recommendations were made. One of the recommendations was to review the speed of development.
An audit of our processes showed that our timeline was comparable to other organisations that produce high-quality guidelines and all stages were necessary to achieve NICE accreditation. However, it was clear that communication around the process could be improved. In response, we produced a timeline flowchart to show each step of development and an indication of how long each stage should take.
We hope our members will find this useful.
Further changes and improvements will be made to our processes and the clinical guideline documents and we will keep you informed of these.
Clinical effectiveness team
Publishing & Digital team
Author(s)
