The purpose of this Question Verification Form is to enable Priority Setting Partnerships (PSPs) to describe clearly how they checked that their questions were unanswered, before starting the interim prioritisation stage of the process.
The JLA requires PSPs to be transparent and accountable in defining their own scope and evidence checking process. This will enable researchers and other stakeholders to understand how individual PSPs decided that their questions were unanswered, and any limitations of their evidence checking.
Name of the PSP
Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia (Australia) Priority Setting Partnership: Gaps in the CDH Journey
Please describe the scope of the PSP
All stages of the CDH journey were considered relevant to this PSP.
Explicitly, the scope of the CDH Australia PSP defined as:
- Management of pregnancies where CDH has been antenatally detected
- Counselling and communication to families about management of CDH
- Postnatal management, including resuscitation, stabilisation, surgical intervention and post-operative management
- Longer term follow-up and management of patients with CDH; care of expectant parents previously diagnosed with CDH
- Improving the wellbeing of patients and families who have been directly impacted by a diagnosis or care of a child with CDH
Papers were excluded if they were not relevant or translatable to Australian clinical practice.
Please provide a brief overview of your approach to checking whether the questions were unanswered
Questions submitted via the first survey were categorised into themes by members of the steering group. Small working groups of 2–3 steering group members were assigned a theme and collated questions into summary questions using non-technical language. Summary questions were agreed upon by the steering group. Cochrane and electronic databases were searched using predetermined key words. Duplicates were removed. Only full text publications published in English in the past 10 years were considered.
Please list the type(s) of evidence you used to verify your questions as unanswered
Questions were excluded if answers existed within a Cochrane review or systematic review of randomised control trials (RCTs), or considered partially answered if a high-quality RCT or multi-centre cohort study was completed. Existing international guidelines were not considered sufficient to exclude a question. The remaining 50 summary questions were carried forward for the following prioritisation stage.
Please list the sources that you searched in order to identify that evidence
The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and by electronic database searches of Medline-Ovid and Embase
What search terms did you use?
Examples of keywords used across and adapted to different databases included:
‘diaphragmatic hernia’
(fetus or foetus or fetal or foetal or pregnant* or gestation* or newborn* or new-born* or baby or babies or neonat* or neo-nat* or infan* or toddler* or pre-schooler* or preschooler* or kinder or kinders or kindergarten* or kinder-aged or boy or boys or girl or girls or child or children or childhood or pediatric* or paediatric* or school-age* or schoolage* or schoolchild* or schoolgirl* or schoolboy* or adolescen* or youth or youths or teen or teens or teenage*).tw,kf,dq,hw.
Please describe the parameters of the search (eg time limits, excluded sources, country/language) and the rationale for any limitations
Searches were limited to publications in English over the past 10 years. While there was no restriction on country of origin, research needed to be translatable to the Australian context.
Names of individuals who undertook the evidence checking
David Stewart
Leah Hickey
Michael Stewart
Trisha Prentice
On what date was the question verification process completed?
24/7/2023
Any other relevant information
None