Background: Methods and processes are in place to ensure that guidelines remain current and up-to-date. In one national guideline development programme the process involves undertaking surveillance reviews of public health guidelines every 2 years, through checking intelligence on the current relevance of the guideline and identifying newly published research evidence.
Increasingly, as resources for guideline development become more scarce, decisions about when to undertake a surveillance review are needed that go beyond consideration of time since publication alone. One of these considerations concerns determining the conditions under which a guideline’s recommendations are expected to remain current and are unlikely to change in the foreseeable future; that is, placing it on a ‘static list’. Guidelines on the static list are reviewed every 5 years for the need to update.

Objectives: This poster will present details of the process and decision tool developed to determine when a guideline should be placed on a static list at NICE. Examples of public health guidelines placed on the static list and rationale for decisions will be provided.

Discussion points: Considerations for placing a guideline on the static list include:
-Has a previous surveillance review yielded a 'no update' decision?
-Have topic experts or a search of national research funders’ databases identified any major on-going research due to be published within the next 5 years which may have an impact on the recommendations, i.e. addressing a ‘gap in the evidence’ or an area that could have feasibly been included in the guideline but was originally deemed out of scope, such as a new technology?
-Is this a fast moving topic area, are new developments expected? This should include assessment of the changing socio-political climate.
-Are a guideline’s recommendations intervention-based or focused on implementation/practice principles, with the latter expected to ‘stand the test of time’?
Circumstances under which a guideline may be taken off the static list will also be discussed.