Changing guidelines via the ILCOR process

Representatives of the American Heart Association, the European Resuscitation Council, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and the Resuscitation Council of South Africa founded the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR) in 1992. Other organisations subsequently joined and in 1995 the task force of ILCOR established a neonatal subgroup. After the 2005 ILCOR publication,6 this subgroup became an autonomous neonatal task force.

For 2010, as with the previous evidence evaluation processes, the specific questions to be evaluated were informed by priorities identified by task forces and individual councils/organisations, review of the research gaps analysis and a thorough systematic approach called ‘evidence mapping’ based on the previous guidelines.7 The questions were structured into a standardised format (PICO: population/patient, intervention, comparison, outcome; http://www.cebm.net/?o=1036).8 Each question was allocated to two worksheet authors selected to avoid potential conflicts of interest. Worksheets were reviewed by the neonatal task force chair and evidence evaluation experts whose feedback guided subsequent revision, and they were subsequently posted on the ILCOR and American Heart Association websites. They were open to comment, which informed further evaluation and revision.

From this evidence, consensus statements on …