Updating and Developing
Wasting Guidelines and Tools
One essential element of the Global Action Plan for wasting is to update and develop normative guidance (wasting guidelines) and tools to support governments on the prevention and treatment of child wasting in all contexts
The World Health Organization (WHO) is the lead agency at a global, regional and national to update this normative guidance and will then work with other UN agencies and key stakeholders, to support the review and update of national guidelines as well as overseeing all future research and policy efforts on child wasting under the Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025).
The resources below give more information about this process and current progress to date. They will be updated as new information becomes available.
INTRODUCTION
One key contribution of the Global Action Plan on Wasting is to develop and update normative guidance to support governments in the prevention and treatment of child wasting (acute malnutrition) in all contexts.
Guidance will be in the form of a WHO Guideline (the ‘what’) and an accompanying Operational Guidance (the ‘how’), with evidence-based recommendations, good practice statements, and tools for implementation.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is the lead agency at a global, regional and national level to update this normative guidance and will then work with other UN agencies and key stakeholders, to support the review and update of national guidelines as well as overseeing future research and policy efforts on wasting under the Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025).
The resources below provide more information about this process and current progress to date. They will be updated as new information becomes available.
PROGRESS TO DATE ON THE WASTING GUIDELINES
September 2020: Updates Webinar from September 2020 on the progress of wasting guidelines development.
November 2021: Updates Webinar from November 2021 on progress of wasting guidelines development.
December 2022: The members and observers of WHO Guideline Development Group have worked incredibly hard this year and volunteered an incredible amount of their time and effort to progress on this huge body of work. All targets for 2022 are not met, but this work is on track and progressing well.
There has been 21 three-hour virtual meetings and four days of face-to-face meetings held at the WHO Headquarters (Geneva, Switzerland) in September 2022. Out of the 16 PICO questions, 11 were covered (see section below for more information on the PICO questions) which have had a focus on the management/treatment aspects of this guideline. The Recommendations and Good Practice Statements are under finalization and will then be submitted to WHO Guidelines Review Committee then to an External Review Committee.
The management Recommendations and Good Practice Statements will be available on MAGICapp in the first part of 2023.
The prevention aspects of the guideline will be worked on with the GDG in early 2023.
WASTING GUIDELINES PICO QUESTIONS
The formulation of the questions that the guideline needs to address strongly influences the final recommendations, so getting this right is crucial. For this purpose, PICO questions are used. PICO is an acronym for population, intervention (or exposure), comparator and outcome. The questions are used to systematically search the evidence base for answers in the areas of uncertainty or controversy that the guideline seeks to clarify. The results of these systematic literature reviews feed into the evidence to decision-making process for recommendations (see below for more information on the general WHO guideline development process)
GUIDELINE DEVELOPMENT GROUP
AND PROCESSES
The WHO Guideline Development Group (GDG) is made up of external [non-WHO] experts whose central task is to develop evidence-based recommendations. The GDG also performs the important task of finalizing the scope and key questions of the guideline in PICO format.
The Guideline Development process is clearly laid out in the WHO Handbook for Guideline Development.
Click below for a short introduction to this process.
The GRADE process and more information on the guideline development process is also shown in the video below.
AN INTRODUCTION TO MAGIC APP
MAGICapp is a web-based tool that helps users and organizations to author, publish and update digitally structured Clinical Practice Guidelines based on best current evidence. A number of WHO guidelines already using MAGICapp such as those for COVID-19, malaria, TB, self-care interventions, amongst others.
Recommendations and accompanying information from the Wasting Guideline will be published on MAGICapp as they are validated by the WHO Guidelines Review Committee and a larger pdf document with all the information from MAGICapp will also be published on the WHO website when the guidelines are finished.
UNICEF - WHO TECHNICAL ADVISORY GROUP
ON WASTING
Reflecting commitments under the Global Action Plan on Child Wasting, WHO and UNICEF have established a partnership to collaborate on the a) prevention, early detection and treatment of child wasting by providing more up-to-date global normative and operational guidance, b) support to national governments in adapting their national guidelines, and c) coordination of the wasting-related research agenda.
To assist in these efforts, an official UNICEF-WHO Technical Advisory Group on Wasting has been formed after an open call and a selection process to ensure representation predominantly of national governments/organisations as well as civil society organisations and the research community.
More information on this group and its activities will be published in due course.
