The GIN-McMaster Guideline Development Checklist (GDC) Extension for Engagement.

Objectives: Better engagement of diverse groups of interest-holders in the development of health guidelines has been proposed to improve their usefulness, implementability, and acceptability. Guidelines shape clinical- or public-health practice decision-making. Trustworthy guidelines are systematically developed documents that include actionable statements based on evidence and a formal, structured and transparent decision process. This paper describes the GIN-McMaster GDC Extension for Engagement to assist developers with engaging multiple interest-holders throughout all topics of guideline development.
Study Design and Setting: To produce this checklist extension, we conducted a three-phase mixed methods study. First, we utilized 10 groups of interest-holders to be engaged in health guideline development: patients, the public, providers, program managers, principal investigators, payers/purchasers of health services, payers/funders of health research, policymakers, peer-reviewed journal editors, and product makers identified in previous work and recruited co-leads to represent these groups (n=26 total).
Results: We conducted a series of reviews to identify existing methods and barriers/facilitators for engagement, approaches to managing conflicts of interest, and describing the impacts of engagement on the guideline development process. The results of these reviews informed the development of an online survey for which we received 195 responses. We clarified these results through 43 key informant interviews with interest-holders. The final GDC extension checklist was determined based on consensus methods with our co-leads.
Conclusion: This paper presents the GIN-McMaster GDC Extension for Engagement. This checklist provides interest-holder-informed recommendations for providing advice/feedback or participating in decision-making in guideline development.
(Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)