On 17-18 April, the 2021 National Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) Methodology Training Course was successfully held in Beijing, which was co-organized with the support of the Lanzhou University, Affiliate of the Cochrane China Network, together with Chinese Medical Association Publishing House and the WHO Collaborating Centre for Guidelines Implementation and Knowledge Translation. Sixty-six clinicians and researchers from 12 provinces and municipalities across China participated in the entire two-day training course.

The organizers invited Prof. Gordon Guyatt from McMaster University, Prof. Zachary Munn from Adelaide University, Prof. Ivan D. Florez from the University of Antioquia and Prof. Elie Akl from American University of Beirut to deliver exciting online presentations to the participants with the topic of “From progress, opportunity and challenge of CPGs over the past three decades”, “Developing guidelines before, during, and after the COVID-19 Pandemic”, “AGREE tools-what are they and how to use them”, and “Development of a WHO rapid advice guide” respectively. And four Chinese leading experts in the field of guideline were also invited and gave lectures from their research perspectives.

In addition to the academic lectures, the whole training session mainly consisted of ten modules covering all steps of the guideline development, including registration, protocol writing, working group establishment, COI management, systematic review of guidelines, investigation of clinical questions, evidence searching, GRADE, formation of recommendations, RIGHT statement, update of guidelines and living guidelines. After the courses, all the participants had lively and face-to-face discussions to share their knowledge.

High-quality guidelines can effectively regulate the clinical practice, improve the quality of health care services and reduce healthcare costs. Thus, we hope that more and more Chinese guideline developers could pay more attention to the methodology of guideline development and this course provided a great opportunity to achieve this. In the future, the Institute of Health Data Science of Lanzhou University, Affiliate of the Cochrane China Network will still make every effort to promote the dissemination and translation of the methodology on CPGs.