Guest Editors: Dr Jan Brozek, Dr Yaolong Chen, Dr Pablo Alonso Coello, Dr Joerg J Meerpohl, Dr Yuan Zhang, Prof Holger Schünemann
Health and Quality of Life Outcomes
Closed to submissions
Improving health outcomes is the ultimate goal of recommendations made in health guidelines and other guidance statements. People important outcomes (PIOs), including the relative importance of these outcomes, quality of life assessment, values and preferences and best methods for integrating them in health care guidelines are at the forefront of methodological and clinical practice research. Considering PIOs in the context of other criteria that influence a health care decision to achieve the greatest possible desirable consequences of a health care option is a preeminent goal of a guideline recommendation. The improvement of both the development of guideline recommendations through methodological research and practical application will now be considered for publication in Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, beginning with this special series.
Health and Quality of Life Outcomes will, for this special series, and subsequent issues consider the following articles for publication on guidelines and guideline methodology: clinical, public health and other health related recommendations and guidelines/guidance, including supplementary materials for guidelines, such as Evidence to Decision Frameworks; and, scientific articles describing methodological research and standards to improve the development, dissemination and implementation of guidelines. For future issues of the journal we do also invite editorials and opinion pieces about guideline development.
Submitted guidelines should follow standards set by the Institutes of Medicine and the Guideline International Network and utilize appropriate methods for the development of guidelines such as the GIN-McMaster Guideline Development checklist. These standards include the use of proven approaches to assess the certainty in the evidence and move from evidence to decisions such as the GRADE approach. Authors of guidelines should follow the RIGHT statement (reference to EQUATOR) for reporting of guidelines to achieve high scores on assessment instruments such as the AGREE instrument.
All articles in this series underwent the journal’s full standard peer-review process. For further information, please contact the Editors (journalsubmissions@springernature.com).