View this article online at www.insightplus.mja.com.au
In times of strain, the quiet work of care — for patients, colleagues, and ourselves — becomes both more difficult and more essential.
Clinical guidelines and consensus statements provide systematic aids to making complex medical decisions. These documents integrate various forms of evidence—including from scientific research, clinician experience, and patient perspectives—with the aim of improving patient care and health outcomes. In this issue of the MJA, Anneliese Synnot and colleagues report findings from their scoping review on the extent and nature of consumer engagement in the development of Australian clinical practice guidelines. Despite recommendations from major guideline bodies that the guideline development process include people with lived experience, Synnot and colleagues found that extensive lived experience engagement was not reported for the majority of guidelines that they assessed. These findings suggest the need for guideline developers and publishers to pay much closer attention to lived experience engagement in Australian guideline development.
2026 marks an inflection point for the MJA in a number of ways. During 2025 we spent time considering how best to position the journal for the future.
