Improving the usability and impact of WHO guidelines: Report of a WHO workshop

The WHO Department of Quality Assurance, Norms and Standards Design Lab conducted a 2-hour workshop on 7 April 2022 in collaboration with Monash University’s Design Health Collab to discuss how the design of WHO guidelines could be changed to make them more accessible to the people and communities that use them.

The workshop was attended by 33 people from eight countries. The participants included national government staff from ministries of health and transport, health care workers, and staff from WHO country and regional offices and headquarters. Participants first described the barriers they had experienced in using guidelines. They were then asked to comment on a guideline that had been redesigned to make it more engaging and to make information easier to find. Participants welcomed the new design, which they found addressed some critical barriers, including language, length and complexity of presentation. Participants commented in particular on the use of colours, white space and highlighting of key points. In a post-workshop survey, the participants rated all the activities at 4 or above (out of 5) and expressed interest in continuing to learn about guideline design. The Quality Assurance, Norms and Standards Design Lab will use the comments of the participants to continue experimenting with new designs and to create a “guideline design principles and toolkit” based on established design principles and readers’ comments.