30 WORLD GASTROENTEROLOGY NEWS APRIL 2015 Editorial | Expert Point of View | Gastro 2015: AGW/WGO | WDHD News | WGO & WGOF News | WGO Global Guidelines | Calendar of Events WGO Global Guidelines & Cascades – 2015 Status and Outlook Anton LeMair, MD WGO Guidelines Project Amsterdam, The Netherlands The World Gastroenterology Organisation (WGO) has been publishing its Global Guidelines since the 1990s and the program has been successful in reaching out to health care workers all over the world. Especially with the Cascades, a non-Western audience is being supported. Professor Greger Lindberg from Sweden accepted the chairmanship of the Guidelines Committee in 2014, following in the footsteps of Professor Michael Fried and his predecessor Guido Tytgat, who developed and built a strong program. What is the status now in 2015 and what are the plans for the nearby future? We spoke with Greger Lindberg in Stockholm at the Karolinska Institutet to find out. WGO’s philosophy is to produce simple, easy to read, and compact guidelines, which allow for a straightforward communication of practice statements and sharing of knowledge – with a focus on clinical implementation and an emphasis on diagnosis and management. We hope to deliver practice guidelines with a greater impact on medical care throughout the world by compensating for the limitations connected with work that is based on the highest level of evidence only. There is a massive list of evidence-based guidelines and very little guidance for doctors working in a low resource environment. We want to change that… Review Teams and Guideline Chairs are being appointed to develop our guidelines. Team members are invited experts representing all the regions that make up the diversity among the membership of WGO and the guideline’s target readership. Guideline Chairs head the Review Teams and together the team members and Guideline Chairs play a crucial role in evaluating the evidence, writing the guideline, and developing the Cascades. We have relatively short throughput times and a very cost-efficient process. Evidence and current medical practice standards are balanced, resulting in resourcebased guidelines to address differences in health care access, financial and technical resources within the user’s communities. The 2015 Status is summarized in the table on page 30 – it shows which 17 of WGO’s 22 online guidelines include Cascades (resource sensitive options for diagnosis and management), the availability of translations, titles published in a compact version in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology (JCG), and inclusion in the National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) databases. On the WGO guideline webpages, through the Graded Evidence service, recent journal articles relevant to each guideline topics are highlighted, while the WGO’s Ask a Librarian service offers a unique service to members of gastrointestinal (GI) societies who do not have easy access to high quality clinical and research information. Monthly literature alerts keep the Guidelines Committee and Review Team members updated on scientific advances related to the guideline topics. Challenges & Future Plans Through our guidelines, we want to improve care in gastroenterology and hepatology worldwide. An ongoing challenge is the global representation in view of a general lack of evidence pertinent to and absence of trials in non-Western settings. An opportunity is to invest in the integration with other WGO activities – synchronization, for instance, with World Digestive Health Day topics – our gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) guideline coming later this year, the curriculum of the WGO Training Centers and Train the Trainer initiatives, spinoffs for
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