Background: The Norwegian Directorate of Health produces national clinical guidelines for the health service, and the development of guidelines must follow international standards for trustworthy clinical practice. We investigated whether the standards are being adhered to.
Material and method: We used the National Guideline Clearinghouse Extent Adherence to Trustworthy Standards Instrument (NEATS) as the scoring tool and assessed a randomly selected chapter from national clinical guidelines that were published or updated during the period 2013 to January 2022. NEATS has 15 domain items; three are assessed with the response alternatives Yes/No/Not known, and twelve are assessed on a Likert scale from 1 to 5, where 1 corresponds to very low trustworthiness and 5 to very high trustworthiness. The assessments were made individually by two authors. Inter-rater reliability was assessed with exact or close reliability, and Cohen's kappa coefficient.
Results: We included 60 relevant guidelines. For nine of the twelve NEATS domain items assessed using the Likert scale, there was very low or low adherence to standards for trustworthy clinical guidelines (median score 1 or 2). The domain items with the lowest score (median score 1) were 'The study selection', 'Description of the studies and the results', 'Rating the strength of recommendations' and 'External review'. The domain item with the highest score was 'Specific and unambiguous articulation of recommendations' (median score 4).
Interpretation: The majority of the national clinical guidelines had low adherence to the standards for trustworthy clinical guidelines assessed using the NEATS scoring tool.