27 WORLD GASTROENTEROLOGY NEWS JULY 2014 Editorial | Expert Point of View | WDHD News | WGO & WGOF News | WGO Global Guidelines | Calendar of Events WGO Global Guidelines In his monthly President’s Let-ter, Professor James Toouli, WGO President, highlighted one of the jewels of WGO activities; the Global Guidelines and Cascades. In putting his letter together he asked the current chair of the Guidelines Committee, Professor Greger Lindberg, to help by providing the details. His contri-bution was so good that it was used as written. Professor Toouli thanks Greger and wishes to acknowledge the wonderful work done by him and his team to the activities of WGO. WGO’s medical practice guideline program is a truly global activity. It all started with a meeting in the Academic Medical Centre (AMC) in The Netherlands in the late nineties. Drs. Justus Krabshuis met the then incoming president of the WGO, Professor GNJ Tytgat, who had a vision…the WGO should and could help Member Societies and colleagues everywhere with producing state of the art guidelines in gastroenterology, endoscopy and hepatology. These guidelines would have to be relevant not just in the ‘West’ but they should be useful everywhere, especially in the more challenged low and middle income (LMIC) countries. Guido Tytgat pushed and encouraged the project and with help from leading topic experts worldwide, a number of guidelines were produced. Relevance was not the only new as-pect. All guidelines were available for free and translated, often by volun-teers, in French, Spanish, Mandarin, Portuguese and Russian. Within a few years we saw that more than half of the guideline downloads were in ‘foreign’ languages, not in English. We knew then we were on the right track. In September of last year, Greger Lindberg had taken over as Chairman for the Global Guidelines Commit-tee after Michael Fried. At the same time Anton LeMair has taken over from Justus Krabshuis as Manager of WGO Guideline Development. Over the years this committee has been very productive and currently has 24 global guidelines that can be down-loaded from WGO’s website in six different languages. In 2014 we hope to update Hepatitis B, Dysphagia, Probiotics, and Needle Stick Injury. Timely updates are critical and we fo-cus on guidelines with cascades which are frequently downloaded. The use of WGO Global Guidelines for teach-ing purposes may need more atten-tion. One possible way to go would be to develop teaching modules for selected guidelines. We will certainly also create new Global Guidelines but numbers will be smaller in the future. The WGO Guideline Committee aims for a truly global reach. This is achieved by promotion through local Member Societies, translation into six languages, and, above all, the unique resource sensitive cascades for diagnosis and management. The philosophy is to produce easy to read and understand, compact guidelines, which allow for a straightforward communication of practice statements and sharing of knowledge, focusing on clinical implementation. Effectiveness is very difficult to measure and since the penetrating and almost paradigm-changing ‘Random Reflections on Effectiveness and Efficiency’ of Archie Cochrane (the mould breaking Scottish epidemiolo-gist whose work led to the setting up of the Cochrane Collaboration) we know we need evidence and we
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