The methodological quality of clinical practice guidelines in psychology: A pilot study of the guidelines developed by the Ordre des Psychologues du Québec.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the availability and proliferation of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) and of methods to design such guidelines in recent years, a growing body of evidence suggests that the quality of CPGs can often be dubious, typically pointing to a lack of methodological rigor in guideline development. In the social sciences and in psychology, numerous CPGs have been developed, yet research has failed to investigate their quality and methodology. This pilot study evaluated the 5 available guidelines of the Order of Psychologists of Quebec (OPQ) using a scoring system proposed by Ansari and Rashidian (2012) for examining guideline development tasks. The method consisted of rating CPGs based on the absence, presence, or detailed consideration of 27 tasks involved in guideline development. Overall, results suggest that the CPGs did not implement important tasks for guideline development, and were far below the acceptable standards in guideline development procedures. A minimal number of the necessary tasks for guideline development were addressed in the CPGs. These findings suggest there are important problems with the development and quality of these CPGs. The pilot study also points to the need for conducting future research on the clinical guidelines used in psychology.Keywords: clinical practice guidelines, clinical guidelines, evidence based practice, methodological rigor, qualityResumeMalgre la disponibilite et la proliferation des guides de pratique clinique (GPC) et des methodes d'elaboration de ces guides au cours des dernieres annees, de plus en plus de preuves indiquent que la qualite des GPC est souvent discutable, indiquant probable- ment un manque de rigueur methodologique au niveau de l'elaboration des lignes directrices. Dans le domaine des sciences sociales et de la psychologie, de nombreux GPC ont ete mis au point. Or, les recherches n'ont pas etudie leur qualite ni leur methodologie. Cette etude pilote visait a evaluer les cinq guides de pratique cliniques de l'Ordre des psychologues du Quebec (OPQ) a l'aide d'un systeme de notation propose par Ansari et Rashidian (2012) afin d'examiner les tâches impliquees dans l'elaboration des guides en question. La methode consistait a evaluer les GPC en se basant sur l'absence, la presence ou l'examen detaille de 27 tâches impliquees dans l'elaboration des guides. Dans l'ensemble, les resultats revelent que les GPC n'ont pas mis en oeuvre d'importantes tâches reliees a l'elaboration de ces derniers et se trouvaient bien en deca des normes acceptables en matiere d'elaboration de lignes directrices. Un tres faible nombre des tâches necessaires a l'elaboration de lignes directrices ont ete prises en compte dans les GPC. Les conclusions de cette etude mettent en lumiere les lacunes importantes au niveau de l'elaboration et de la qualite de ces GPC. L'etude pilote souligne egalement la necessite d'effectuer des recherches ulterieures sur les lignes directrices cliniques utilisees en psychologie.Mots-cles : guides de pratique clinique, lignes directrices cliniques, pratique fondee sur les preuves, rigueur methodologique, qualite.Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are often defined as sys- tematically developed statements to assist practitioners and patient decisions about appropriate health care for specific clinical cir- cumstances (Field & Lohr, 1990, p. 2). More recently, in an effort to propose a definition of CPGs that may be more appropriate for psychology and the social sciences, a taskforce of the Institut National d'Excellence en Sante et Services Sociaux (INESSS) proposed to define CPGs as:Recommendations developed systematically and transparently by and for the stakeholders concerned with a specific intervention in social care. These recommendations are founded on robust scien- tific data supported by exhaustive contextual data and expert knowledge, particularly that of researchers, managers, social care practitioners, and social care users. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.050 | 0.315 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".