Learned counsel | Can guidelines curb the demand for planned healthcare?
Host: Centre for Primary Care, Institute of Population Health
About the event:
Regardless of health issue, health sector, patient condition or treatment modality, the chances are that provision is supported by ‘a guideline’ making professionally-endorsed recommendations on best practice. The paper, which is part of a larger HS&DR funded review on ‘demand management for planned healthcare’, examines whether demand can be curbed and sculptured with the appropriate formal guidance. This hypothesis has been met with a mountain of primary research and a hillock of secondary analysis and this paper consider how best to conduct a systematic review of this landscape.
Our ‘review of reviews’ covers: i) systematic reviews conducted in the Cochrane tradition, ii) qualitative thematic reviews, describing the ‘facilitators and barriers’ to guideline implementation, and iii) a realist synthesis, centring on testing the ‘programme theory’ underlying guidelines. The main and undoubtedly sound conclusion from all of these inquiries is that guidelines have a limited role in addressing demand problems. The reason why guidelines falter is little to do with their content and format but is mostly due to the complex decision structures in which they are embedded.
So what are these underlying decision structures? The paper argues that realist synthesis may be able decipher parts that other review methods cannot reach.
Registration:
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Speakers
Professor Ray Pawson
Role: Professor of Social Research Methodology
Organisation: Leeds University
Dr Joanne Greenhalgh
Role: Principal Research Fellow Sociology and Social Policy
Organisation: Leeds University
Dr Cathy Brennan
Role: Leeds Institute of Health Sciences
Organisation: Leeds University
Travel and Contact Information
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3.204
University Place
Manchester
