Study title

The Guideline Utilization Resource Unit (GURU) is composed of knowledge management specialists (KMS) and nurse facilitators (NF) who support multidisciplinary teams in developing, implementing, and evaluating provincial clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) for the diagnosis, staging, treatment and follow-up of cancer. These CPGs are evidence-based documents with consensus recommendations; they are freely available on a public website for access by practitioners and patients, and are a form of grey literature. Team members at GURU consult regularly with the librarian to ensure that the most accurate and comprehensive search strategy is used to develop CPGs. The goal of this project is to describe the process of organizing and evaluating a journal club involving a unique collaboration between guideline developers and a librarian.

The journal club is comprised of three KMSs, two NFs, the GURU Manager and an embedded librarian. The group has been meeting once per month since April 2012. Each member takes turns selecting two articles related to CPG development or implementation, and is responsible for leading an informal discussion. To evaluate the usefulness of the journal club and the impact of grey literature on CPG development in Alberta, all members of the journal club (n=7) were interviewed in a focus group setting or a semi-structured interview. Transcripts of audio-recorded interviews will be qualitatively analyzed for repeated themes related to knowledge gained from, and perceived benefits of journal club meetings. This datasets contains these transcripts.