Dunja Dreesens

28 Methods General design This study is a descriptive scoping review of knowledge tool types developed by Dutch national healthcare organisations and tools that support clinicians or patients with knowledge transfer and shared decision-making. The general purpose for conducting scoping reviews is to identify and map the available evidence, in this case tool types. Arksey & O’Malley, and Levac et al, also described several reasons why scoping reviews are conducted. We chose this kind of review because we wanted to examine the amount and range of available tool types, and gain insight into the provided definitions (93, 94). Data sources The websites, documents and links to other sources on the websites of purposive sampled Dutch healthcare organisations known to develop and disseminate knowledge tools were used as data sources. Organisations that solely fund or research such tools were excluded. Because of the multitude of organisations in the Netherlands developing and disseminating knowledge tools, the authors selected seventeen of them: three medical specialists associations, two allied healthcare organisations, five guideline agencies, one umbrella organisation for professionals, five government agencies and one umbrella organisation for patients (see appendix A). Inclusion criteria for the tool types Included in this review were those tool types which are being developed and made available by Dutch nationwide non-commercial healthcare organisations; are related to care content; for which an evidence-based approach was followed; which are intended for knowledge transfer and decision support; are publicly accessible and which concern cure and/or palliative care (figure 1). We used the following definition of a tool: a tool distils, synthesizes and interprets the highest quality knowledge and research to serve knowledge translation and support (shared) decision-making (95). Related, secondary tools that are based on these primary tools, with the main purpose to educate and/or implement were, albeit contributing to knowledge translation, excluded. Identification, selection of tools and data extraction A scan of the selected organisations was undertaken to reveal which search terms to use in order to identify knowledge tools (see appendix B). These terms were then processed through two thesauri (9, 96) to find synonyms and related terms. The list of terms was entered into the search engines on the websites of the organisations. If a website did not support searches for compound terms (for example, ‘evidence table’), the yield of hits for the separate search terms was checked for their combination. In cases of various spellings for the same term, e.g. ‘shared decision-making’ and ‘shared decision making’, both spellings were used. If a website did not provide a search engine, the terms were searched on the webpages by the first author with the help of the web browser search function and by manual inspection. Chapter 2