New approaches for identifying evidence for living guidelines

Clinical guidelines summarise health research and inform decisions by health professionals but rapidly become out of date. Living guidelines are a new approach to providing timely, reliable guidance. Enablers and barriers to transitioning to living guidelines were investigated among Australian guideline developers. Approaches to continual evidence surveillance were implemented and evaluated for living guidelines in stroke and COVID-19, resulting in improved efficiencies and highlighting the role of information specialists in designing systems that are adaptable and feasible. Systematic reviews often inform the guidelines recommendations, but analyses of reviews of COVID-19 revealed substantial problems with redundancy, lack of currency and poor reporting.