Please Welcome the AGREE GRS
The AGREE Research Team has recently reformatted the AGREE Global Rating Scale (AGREE GRS) to make it easier to use. The AGREE GRS is available as a fillable PDF from the AGREE Enterprise website’s Resource Centre, https://www.agreetrust.org/resource-centre/agree-ii-grs-instrument/.
For those who are unfamiliar with the AGREE GRS, it is a shorter appraisal tool based on the AGREE II to evaluate the quality and reporting of clinical practice guidelines. The AGREE GRS may be useful as an alternative to the more comprehensive AGREE II if resources are sparse or use of the AGREE II is not feasible; however, we continue to recommend the AGREE II as the primary appraisal tool for clinical practice guidelines. The AGREE GRS was first tested and published in 2012 as the Global Rating Scale (GRS). Reliability testing indicated that it was able to predict important outcome measures related to guideline adoption, despite its lower sensitivity in detecting differences in guideline quality when compared to the AGREE II. In this new version, we have updated the tool’s layout so that it is similar in format to the AGREE II and added user instructions. We hope these updates will help facilitate the application of this valid, shorter guideline quality assessment tool.
