Gordon Guyatt

Dr. Gordon Guyatt is a Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact Medicine and Clinical at McMaster University.  He is a general internist who has been heavily involved in clinical research.  He has published over 1,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals; his work has been cited over 145,000 times. In 1990, Dr. Guyatt coined the term ‘evidence-based medicine’ and he has provided leadership in developing the methods for evidence-based clinical decision making and evidence-based practice guidelines worldwide. As a clinical researcher, he has developed a number of instruments to measure health-related quality of life, and has played a major role in many important randomized trials.  As a methodologist, he has advanced methods of health status measurement, clinical trial conduct, systematic review methods, and guideline development.  He has played a major role in the creation and refinement of the GRADE approach to rating quality of evidence and grading strength of recommendations. In 2011, Dr. Guyatt received Canada’s highest award for civilians, an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2013 was chosen as the Canadian Institute for Health Research Researcher of the Year and in 2016 he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

Dr. Guyatt also has a long involvement in health policy issues and advocacy on social issues.  He has made important contributions to Canadian health policy debates by applying the methodology of systematic reviews to health policy issues, in particular the outcomes of private for-profit versus private not-for-profit health care delivery.  He has been an outspoken advocate for universal publicly funded health care, including many publications on the issue in the lay press and many public appearances.  His Officer of the Order of Canada citation includes an acknowledgment of Dr. Guyatt’s social justice work.

Clinical practice guidelines represent useful tools for improving clinical care. Standards for trustworthy guidelines are well established.  Optimal guideline panels will include experts in the content area, methodologists, front-line clinicians, and patients and will address possible conflicts of interest. Trustworthy guidelines will be based on systematic summaries of the best available evidence and include ratings of the quality of evidence.  In moving from evidence to recommendations, panels will make their values and preferences explicit.  Even trustworthy recommendations may become rapidly out of date.  BMJ Rapid Recommendations provide a strategy for producing trustworthy guidelines responsive to new, practice-changing evidence.