Protocol of reporting items for public versions of guidelines: the Reporting Tool for Practice Guidelines in Health Care-public versions of guidelines.

Introduction: Patient and public versions of guidelines (PVGs) can help with individual decision making and enhance the patient-clinician relationship by providing easily understandable and reliable information. An increasing number of guideline organisations are developing PVGs. However, the reporting of PVGs by different groups and organisations varies widely. This study aims to develop a reporting checklist for PVGs for healthcare.

Methods And Analysis: We will develop the PVG reporting checklist as an extension of the Reporting Tool for Practice Guidelines in Healthcare (RIGHT) statement. We will build on the methods recommended by the EQUATOR network, which is our starting point. We will conduct a literature review, establish an international multidisciplinary team, run a modified Delphi process to identify the reporting items and pilot test the draft reporting checklist. We plan to update the checklist every 3 years.

Ethics And Dissemination: Ethics approval and patient consent are not required since this study will not undertake any formal data collection involving humans or animals. The results of this protocol will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal for publication.

Trial Registration: We registered the protocol on the EQUATOR network (http://www.equator-network.org/library/reporting-guidelines-under-development/#84).