Page 27 - Shared Guideline Development Experiences in Fertility Care

Introduction
Several prominent organizations have emphasized the importance of patient involvement in Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG) development [1-8]. is has
been resulted in special programmes and toolkits that aim to embed patient involvement in the guideline development process, such as the NICE’s Patient 2 and Public Involvement Programme, the SIGN’s patient network, the Dutch participation guide and the G-I-N PUBLIC Toolkit [9-12]. e CPG development
process generally comprises several phases, i.e. de ning the scope (topic selection) of the guideline, formulating key questions, systematically reviewing relevant literature and appraising its quality, formulating recommendations, writing the dra version, reviewing and nalizing the guideline [2, 13, 14].
Organizations emphasize the involvement of patients in an early phase of CPG development, but published initiatives on this topic generally focus on the writing and reviewing phase of the CPG development process or on written consultation of patient organizations when the scope has been dra ed yet [6, 9-12, 15, 16]. By de ning a well-constructed scope of the CPG together with a group of patients and di erent stakeholders, the CPG will focus on care points susceptible for improvement. is could facilitate its implementation and increase its potential bene t. Such a multidisciplinary and patient-centred approach seems especially bene cial to diseases requiring complex healthcare [3, 17-20]. For example, within fertility care, couples having problems to conceive can meet di erent disciplines, such as general practitioners (GPs), gynaecologists, urologists, clinical embryologists or clinical psychologists [21, 22]. Patients who are involved in such complex care paths are ‘the experts of their own healthcare’; they relate it to their personal circumstances (e.g. work, comorbidity) and their needs and values, while surveying their whole care process beyond all their care providers from a di erent point of view and with di erent expectations of care [23]. Consequently, they might identify di erent care aspects compared with professionals that need improvement and need to be addressed in guidelines (i.e. key clinical issues) [24- 30]. erefore, this study aims to assess patients’ added value to the scoping phase of a multidisciplinary guideline on infertility. For this purpose, we compared the identi ed key clinical issues to be addressed in this guideline between infertile patients and professionals in fertility care.
Key clinical issues in fertility care
25