Abstract

Practice guidelines are considered as a means of organizing and accelerating knowledge transfer. It is estimated that 10,000 practice guidelines of all types are published every year. According to a recent study, close to one third of Canadian occupational health and safety (OHS) researchers have participated in the development of a guide in the last five years.

The people in charge of this study reviewed the literature on clinical practice guidelines in order to extract the key instructions and to see what could be transferable to the OHS field. This choice is explained by the abundant projects on health practice guidelines and the publications on this subject in the last 25 years. A database of the OHS guides published in French that can be downloaded free of charge has been produced and made available on the Web site of the Québec OHS research network.