Dunja Dreesens

31 Sometimes the organisations only mentioned the name of the tool and offered little or no description. In several cases, the information was retrieved by looking at documents on the website or in hard-copy papers obtained from the organisation itself. Moreover, not all tools were accessible via the Internet; some were only available to organisation members or upon payment. In this case, we attempted to obtain a demo version which might yield a description of the tool. Most organisations that we contacted were willing to offer additional information and made demos of their tools available free of charge. These demos, however, did not always yield descriptions either. Some organisations did not describe the tool on their website, while others offered more than one description. On several websites compound terms were mentioned but only the simple term was explained. For instance, the website of the Federation Medical Specialists explains the term ‘guideline’ but does not explain the term ‘multidisciplinary guideline’. What is meant by ‘multidisciplinary’ is left to the reader: more than two disciplines of medical specialists, other healthcare professionals, or even other parties such as insurers, providers and patients? As mentioned above, the characteristic of public or patient involvement during tool development was difficult to determine. This was apparent in 28 descriptions of tool types, of which five mentioned explicitly that there was no patient or public involvement, and for 34 tools this could not be ascertained. These figures were almost the same as those for the characteristic ‘authorized’ or ‘legitimatised’ by the organisation(s) involved in the development of the tool: 26 tools were authorised, three were not, and for 38 tools this could not be determined. Four tools were deemed limited accessible; these were difficult to find online at the time of the review. Figure 2: Tool types found Chapter 2