Dear Health New Zealand,

Please can you provide the standard resources used by at Te Whatu Ora that are:

a) provided to third parties and contractors and that set the expectations that those creating health guidelines are drafted to meet the expected requirements.

b) used by Te Whatu Ora to appraise health guidelines that are received from the third party / contractors prior to fulflllment of their contract to validate that they meet the expected quality.

To assist I provide this example which used the Appraisal of Guidelines for REsearch & Evaluation (AGREE) II instrument to assess quality but of course there are others such as those from NICE, the US National Academies of Medicine and the World Health Organisation. AGREE contains 23 criteria organised around six quality domains (scope and purpose, stakeholder involvement, rigour of development, clarity of presentation, applicability and editorial independence). I note that one of the guidelines assessed in this review was the New Zealand Guideline (Oliphant et al) which had failing grades against three of the six themes and was assessed at 22 of 23 of the available international guidelines.

https://adc.bmj.com/content/archdischild... (see table 1)

Yours faithfully,

Jan Rivers