Can We Develop Evidence-Based Guidelines Without Research Expertise?

The development and implementation of clinical practice guidelines has flourished over the past two decades. Unfortunately, many studies have found that the quality of such guidelines is highly variable (Alonso-Coello et al. in Qual Safe Health Care 19:e58, 2010; MacQueen et al. in Can J Psychiatry 62:11-23, 2016); research suggests that some of the guidelines used in psychology have been developed using poor methods for guideline development (Bennett et al. in Depress Anxiety 35:330-340, 2018; Trepanier et al. in: Can Psychol 58: 211-217, 2017). While there remains a dearth of research in this area, typically, it is guidelines themselves that are examined by researchers, while too little attention is paid to the developers, and more specifically to how the guideline development groups are composed and the nature of the expertise of those involved in developing the guidelines. Given the importance of grounding guidelines in science, it is key that guideline development groups be comprised of research experts that will help ensure that this essential aspect be respected. In this brief paper, we provide findings from a recent study in which group composition as well as the expertise of guideline development committee members at the Order of Psychologists of Quebec (OPQ) was examined, as defined by academic research productivity. As results highlighted a clear imbalance between clinical and research expertise in these specific committees, with only a small percentage of researchers being represented, we conclude that major improvements need to be made for research to properly reach practitioners and make recommendations to facilitate this.