First COVID-19 guidelines launched to help Australian clinicians deliver best care

Medical News: Australian healthcare professional groups have come together to develop new guidelines that will provide world-first, continually updated evidence-based guidance to clinicians caring for people with COVID-19.

This innovation has been developed under the auspices of the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce based at Cochrane Australia in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University.

Chair of the Taskforce, Associate Professor Julian Elliott, said “There is urgent need to arm Australia’s healthcare professionals with evidence-based guidance on how best to care for people with COVID-19. These will be ‘living guidelines’, updated with new research in near real-time in order to give reliable, up-to-the minute recommendations to the clinicians during this unprecedented health crisis. These guidelines will help our frontline clinicians treat COVID-19 with confidence, knowing that their approach is backed by evidence and the very latest research from around the world.”

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These guidelines follow the recent international release of the first guidance on caring for critically-ill COVID-19 patients.

Using ground-breaking evidence surveillance and automation technologies, the Taskforce will identify and summarise global COVID-19 research findings and feed this evidence to guideline panels every week, drawn from across Australia’s clinical and consumer communities. The results will then be delivered into the hands of clinicians at point of care. This will provide a trusted ‘single source’ of advice to help inform clinical decisions.

“This is about ensuring that Australian clinicians are supported at the front line with the right information. There is a lot of conflicting advice circulating and not all of it is based on good quality evidence. We can leverage our world-leading technologies and our partnership with the globally trusted Cochrane network to make sure Australian healthcare professionals have the very best information at their finger-tips,” said Professor Elliott.