Validation of our first aid guideline for laypeople

14/03/23

In 2021, Belgian Red Cross published its updated evidence-based first aid manual for laypeople, titled ‘Help! First aid for everyone’. In updating this manual, we followed the rigorous methodology of the AGREE II instrument, which is the current gold standard used for guideline development. We updated our existing evidence summaries and developed several new ones, resulting in 490 up-to-date evidence summaries (freely available through our First Aid Evidence Summary Database). 

In 2017, we already received a formal “validation stamp” by the Belgian Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (Cebam), an independent scientific institute that assesses the methodological quality of clinical practice guidelines in Belgium, proving that our first aid guideline for laypeople was of sound methodological quality. 
In 2022, we resubmitted the updated guideline and again went through the validation process, which just recently resulted in a renewal of our certificate of “high-quality evidence-based guideline”. The updated guideline will be soon integrated in ebpracticenet, the reference platform of validated evidence-based practice guidelines for Belgian healthcare providers (freely accessible after eID login).