Now blooming with living guidelines

Each TG guideline contains hundreds of recommendations that are reviewed every 4 to 6 years when the guideline is updated. However, medical knowledge continues to evolve at an ever-faster rate so, following significant research and development, TG has launched a new ‘living guidelines approach’ to ensure our topics remain bang up to date.

A living guideline is one in which individual recommendations are updated when evidence or practice changes, rather than waiting for the next scheduled review of all recommendations—which could be years away.

TG contains over 2500 topics, so developing a new process to update recommendations in a guideline when signals for change arise in addition to the 4- to 6-yearly scheduled reviews of all recommendations, was a mighty challenge—we needed a bigger team, new technology, and effective surveillance methodology. After years of hard work, we’re delighted that the first topic updates using the new process went live a few weeks ago. Currently, feedback from users and expert group members largely drives our ‘living approach’, but we’re committed to expanding our surveillance methodology over the coming years.

The result: information in TG is more up to date than ever before.

For a summary of practice-changing updates in each TG release, see Updates. If you think a topic needs a refresh, drop us a line: contact us.