GRADE-ADOLOPMENT of clinical practice guidelines and creation of clinical pathways for the primary care management of chronic respiratory conditions in Pakistan

Adolopment of clinical practice guidelines and creation of referral pathways for psychiatric conditions in Pakistan

Psychiatric disorders are highly prevalent in Pakistan and burdens the scarce number of psychiatrists present in the country. The establishment of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines (EBCPGs) and primary-care referral pathways within the local context is imperative to make the process efficient. In this Health Policy, we aimed to develop EBCPGs and primary-care referral pathways that are specific to Pakistan's primary-care setting, with the aim of facilitating the management of psychiatric conditions. Ten EBCPGs were created through the GRADE-ADOLOPMENT process; two recommendations were adopted with minor changes, 43 were excluded, and all others were adopted without any changes. Ten primary-care referral pathways for managing ten psychiatric disorders were created and 23 recommendations were added which will help to bridge the gap in care provision. These psychiatric referral pathways and EBCPGs will bring Pakistan's healthcare system a step closer to achieving optimal health outcomes for patients.

The CalculAuthor: determining authorship using a simple-to-use, fair, objective, and transparent process

Authorship determination on a research article remains a largely subjective process. Existing guidelines on authorship taxonomy lack objectivity and are more useful in determining who deserves authorship rather than determining the order of authors. To promote best practices in authorship taxonomy, we developed an authorship rubric that provides a fair, objective, and transparent means of crediting authorship. We christened this tool the "CalculAuthor". The following steps are to be undertaken to create a scoring system based on the requirements of the projects: determining creditable criteria, assigning credit weightages, deciding levels of contribution, determining each author's contribution, calculating authorship scores and ranking. These must be performed by or in close collaboration with the primary investigator (PI), with conflicts being resolved at the PI's discretion. All team members should be informed about the authorship determination process early in the project and their agreement regarding its use must be obtained. While the CalculAuthor was developed to be used in medical research, its customizability enables it to be employed in any field of academia. We recommend that the CalculAuthor be piloted within institutions before its mainstream adoption, and any institution-specific factors should be considered to make the process more efficient and suitable.