Background: Therapeutic Guidelines Limited (TGL) provide concise, independent, evidence-based recommendations for patient management. Supported by Therapeutic Guidelines Foundation, the Developing Countries Programme expanded in 2016 to further promote the offer of access to TGL guidelines free-of-charge to those working in low- and middle-income countries, and provide assistance to the development of local standard treatment guidelines.
Objectives: To improve access to high-quality, independent information on the best-available drug therapies, TGL offers health professionals from low- and middle-income countries:
Access to Therapeutic Guidelines free of charge; and, guideline development resources and capacity building to support the development of local standard treatment guidelines.
Methods: Access to Therapeutic Guidelines content is provided free-of-charge via books, subscriptions to eTG Complete online and the newly released offline App version of eTG Complete.
Other guideline development resources offered by the Developing Countries Programme include:
A Guideline Development Manual tailored to the low-resource context
Access to Australian health professionals via the Expert Clinician Register for clinical support during the guideline development phase
Access to capacity building programmes delivered in country or via the Visiting Editor Programme to learn the TGL guideline development process
Results: Data collected since April 2016 will be presented to illustrate the number and professional background of individuals that have requested access to TGL guidelines, the reasons TGL guidelines are needed, and the types of assistance that local health professionals need to support their guideline development programmes.
Conclusions:The volume and nature of requests for access to TGL guidelines and locally tailored capacity building programs suggests access to affordable health resources and staff with appropriate expertise remains inadequate in low-resource settings. Although the Developing Countries Programme is relatively new there appears to be a demand for support to produce high-quality, evidence-based, contextually appropriate guidelines.