The James Lind Initiative: books, websites and databases to promote critical thinking about treatment claims, 2003 to 2018.

Background: The James Lind Initiative (JLI) was a work programme inaugurated by Iain Chalmers and Patricia Atkinson to press for better research for better health care. It ran between 2003 and 2018, when Iain Chalmers retired. During the 15 years of its existence, the JLI developed three strands of work in collaboration with the authors of this paper, and with others.

Moving from evidence to developing recommendations in guidelines: article 11 in Integrating and coordinating efforts in COPD guideline development. An official ATS/ERS workshop report.

Introduction: Professional societies, like many other organizations around the world, have recognized the need to use more rigorous processes to ensure that healthcare recommendations are informed by the best available research evidence. This is the 11th of a series of 14 articles that methodologists and researchers from around the world prepared to advise guideline developers for respiratory and other diseases on how to achieve this goal. For this article, we developed five key questions and updated a review of the literature on moving from evidence to recommendations.

Synthesis, grading, and presentation of evidence in guidelines: article 7 in Integrating and coordinating efforts in COPD guideline development. An official ATS/ERS workshop report.

Introduction: Professional societies, like many other organizations around the world, have recognized the need to use more rigorous processes to ensure that health care recommendations are informed by the best available research evidence. This is the seventh of a series of 14 articles that were prepared to advise guideline developers in respiratory and other diseases on approaches for guideline development. This article focuses on synthesizing, rating, and presenting evidence in guidelines.

Tailored Implementation For Chronic Diseases (TICD): a project protocol.

Background: The assumption underlying tailoring is that implementation interventions are most helpful if these effectively address the most important determinants of practice for improvement in the targeted setting. The aim of the Tailored Implementation For Chronic Diseases (TICD) project is to develop valid and efficient methods of tailoring implementation interventions to determinants of practice for knowledge implementation in chronic illness care.

Methods: The TICD project has organized the planned empirical research in three work packages that follow the three main steps of tailoring: identification of determinants of healthcare practice, matching implementation interventions to identified determinants of practice, and applying and assessing the tailored implementation interventions.

Towards systematic reviews that inform health care management and policy-making.

Objectives: To identify ways to improve the usefulness of systematic reviews for health care managers and policy-makers that could then be evaluated prospectively.

Methods: We systematically reviewed studies of decision-making by health care managers and policy-makers, conducted interviews with a purposive sample of them in Canada and the United Kingdom (n = 29), and reviewed the websites of research funders, producers/purveyors of research, and journals that include them among their target audiences (n = 45).

Results: Our systematic review identified that factors such as interactions between researchers and health care policy-makers and timing/timeliness appear to increase the prospects for research use among policy-makers.

[How do general practice assistants keep themselves up to date?].

Background: The opportunities for continuing education among general practice (GP) assistants vary because of their dependence on their employers' attitudes and interests. Not all available continuing education activities are equally effective. The purpose of this study was to describe GP assistants' use of a range of quality improvement and continuing education activities, especially with regard to how much time was spent on each activity and how often the activities were used.

[What do general practitioners do to keep themselves up to date?].

Background: Continuing education should ensure that a doctor provides effective care based on the best available evidence. But not all continuing education is equally effective.

Material And Methods: A questionnaire on continuing education was sent to 1500 general practitioners (GPs) in Norway.

[Guidelines in general practice--are they read and are they used?].

Background: Many guidelines are not developed from systematic models and are not based on high-quality evidence. The existence of a guideline does not in itself lead to changes in practice and many guidelines are not used once they have been issued.

Material And Methods: A questionnaire on continuing education and the use of guidelines was sent to 1500 general practitioners (GP) and GP assistants in 1321 general practices in Norway.