Page 167 - Shared Guideline Development Experiences in Fertility Care

eight issues that were not mentioned by the professionals. ese main key clinical issues mainly concerned patient-centred aspects of care on the professional and organizational domain (e.g. poor information provision and poor alignment of care). Both groups mentioned two main key clinical issues collectively that were interpreted di erently: the lack of emotional support and respect for patients’ values.
We concluded that including patients in the guideline development process beginning in the rst phase leads to the identi cation of valuable additional main key clinical issues for the next step of a multidisciplinary guideline development process and broadens the scope of the guideline, particularly regarding patient- centredness and organizational issues from a patients’ perspective.
Chapter 3 focuses on the second question:
To what extent does a patient-centred network approach to multidisciplinary guideline development in infertility provide a feasible format for multidisciplinary guideline development regarding the actual performance of a set of guidelines, its time investments, and experiences with the approach?
To answer this question a feasibility study was performed, including a detailed process evaluation of the guideline development process, professionals’ experiences with the network approach, and time invested. We used a patient-centred network approach to develop ve harmonized guidelines (one multidisciplinary and four monodisciplinary) around clinical pathways in fertility care.
e network structure comprised the centrally located patients and the steering
committee; a multidisciplinary guideline development group (gynaecologists,
physicians, urologists, clinical embryologists, clinical chemists, a medical psychologist, an occupational physician, and two patient representatives); and
four monodisciplinary guideline development groups. e guideline development
addressed patient-centred, organizational, and medical-technical key questions
derived from interviews with patients and professionals. ese questions
were elaborated and distributed among the groups. We evaluated the project performance, participants’ perceptions of the approach, and the time needed,
including time for analysis of secondary sources, interviews with eight key gures, 8 and a written questionnaire survey among 35 participants.
Within 20 months, this approach helped us develop a multidisciplinary guideline for treating infertility and four related monodisciplinary guidelines for general
Summary
165