Page 124 - Shared Guideline Development Experiences in Fertility Care

Chapter 6
Indicator development
e RAND-modi ed Delphi method (a two-round systematic consensus method using expert panels) was used to develop two sets (i.e. one from the patients’ and one from the professionals’ perspective) of quality indicators for patient- centredness [22]. e indicator development process comprised three consecutive steps: (1) extraction and classi cation of NGs’ key recommendations; (2) written questionnaire survey and (3) consensus round by email.
Participants
One patients’ panel and one multidisciplinary professionals’ panel were formed in order to develop two sets of quality indicators for patient-centredness of fertility care. For the patient panel, infertile patients were recruited through a call for participation at ‘Freyawiki’ (the tool used for patient involvement in the NG), social media channels and mailings from Freya, the Dutch Patients’ Association for infertility. Eligibility criteria included (previous) homologous treatment with MAR-techniques. Furthermore, two executives of Freya, involved in the development of the NG, were added to the patient panel.
Professionals were recruited by a letter signed by the coordinator (EB), the project leader (JK) and the implementation and performance measurements expert (RH) of the NG. In this letter, professional societies were asked to o cially nominate professionals experienced in fertility care as well as in performance monitoring. e societies of gynaecologists, urologists and GPs were asked to nominate three professionals. For the participation of clinical embryologists, occupational physicians, clinical psychologists, and clinical biochemists, each particular professional society was asked to nominate two professionals. e intended number of participants for inclusion in both panels was 15-17 participants. is was based on previously published studies describing the number of participants in multidisciplinary expert panels [22, 23]. e rough balance between di erent stakeholders was chosen in proportion to the extent of their key role in fertility care.
Step 1: extraction and classi cation of NGs’ recommendations
First, all listed recommendations were extracted from the NG (E.B.). Next, the extracted recommendations were classi ed into two quality domains (i.e. medical- technical and patient-centredness of care) by three researchers independently (E.B., W.N. and R.H). e inclusion criteria for the patient-centredness domain
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