ArticleJournal of evaluation in clinical practice2022
From "getting things right" to "getting things right now": Developing COVID-19 guidance under time pressure and knowledge uncertainty.
Article in Journal of evaluation in clinical practice, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- In uncharted territory: managing the COVID-19 pandemic in Swedish regions and municipalities from a primary health care perspective.Scandinavian journal of primary health care · 2026Article
- Including patient experiences from online sources in guidelines: A natural language processing study on scabies.PloS one · 2026Article
- Addressing evidence needs during health crises in the province of Quebec (Canada): a proposed action plan for rapid evidence synthesis.BMC health services research · 2025Article
- Paracetamol Use and COVID-19 Clinical Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Capturing Emerging Experiential Knowledge for Vaccination Guidelines Through Natural Language Processing: Proof-of-Concept Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- An elephant in the glasshouse? Trade-offs between acceleration and transformation in COVID-19 vaccine innovation policies.Environmental innovation and societal transitions · 2023Article
- Evidence-basing for quality improvement; bringing clinical practice guidelines closer to their promise of improving care practices.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2022Article
- Mediating scarcity in pandemic times: an ethnographic study on the prevention and control of SARS-CoV-2 infections during the emergence of the corona crisis in the Netherlands.BMC health services research · 2022Article
- From "getting things right" to "getting things right now": Developing COVID-19 guidance under time pressure and knowledge uncertainty.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundAt the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, guidance was needed more than ever to direct frontline healthcare and national containment strategies. Rigorous guidance based on robust research was compromised by the emergence of the pandemic and the urgency of need for guidance. Rather than aiming to "get guidance right", guidance developers needed to "get guidance right now".
aimTo examine how guidance developers have responded to the need for credible guidance at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
methodsAn exploratory mixed-methods study was conducted among guidance developers. A web-based survey and follow-up interviews were used to examine the most pertinent challenges in developing COVID-19 guidance, strategies used to address these, and perspectives on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on future guidance development.
resultsThe survey was completed by 46 guidance developers. Survey findings showed that conventional methods of guidance development were largely unsuited for COVID-19 guidance, with 80% (n = 37) of respondents resorting to other methods. From the survey and five follow-up interviews, two themes were identified to bolster the credibility of guidance in a setting of extreme uncertainty: (1) strengthening end-user involvement and (2) conjoining evidence review and recommendation formulation. 70% (n = 32) of survey respondents foresaw possible changes in future guidance production, most notably shortening development time, by reconsidering how to balance between rigour and speed for different types of questions.
conclusion"Getting guidance right" and "getting guidance right now" are not opposites, rather uncertainties are always part of guidance development and require guidance developers to balance scientific robustness with usability, acceptability, adequacy and contingency. This crisis points to the need to acknowledge uncertainties of scientific evidence more explicitly and points to mechanisms to live with such uncertainty, thus extending guidance development methods and processes more widely.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.