Background: Clear and transparent reported practice guidelines could help healthcare practitioners, health administrators, programme managers, and the public to understand and implement recommendations.

Objectives: To investigate the reporting characteristics of WHO practice guidelines according to the RIGHT statement.

Methods: We examined WHO guidelines published in 2015 and 2016, and included those published in English. We obtained a list of all such guidelines from the GRC Secretariat, and downloaded documents from the WHO website. We referred to the Reporting Items for practice Guidelines in HealThcare (RIGHT) Statement to design our extraction form, and two researchers independently extracted data and solved disagreement through discussion.

Results: Twenty-two guidelines were included, and 16 and six were published in 2015 and 2016 respectively. According to the RIGHT reporting tool, there were no guidelines reported the limitation of guideline; the retrival method of existed systematic review (45%) and role of funder (36%) were reported in under 50% of the guidelines; the reporting rate of the focus of the guideline, abbreviations/ terms, the use of systematic review, and outcomes selection fell into 50-75% (68%, 68%, 73% and 64%), and; all the rest items were reported in over 85% of the gudelines, five were 86%, five were 91%, eight were 95%, and nine were 100%. The detailed information can be found in the table provided in attachment.

Conclusions: The general reporting of WHO guideline is in a good condition. But there is still room to improve, especially on the reporting of the limitation of guidelines, existed systematic review retrieval and the detailed role of funders.