The Alberta Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Ambassador Program: The Development of a Contextually Relevant, Multidisciplinary Clinical Practice Guideline for Non-specific Low Back Pain: A Review.
OBJECTIVE
To describe the development of a contextually relevant multidisciplinary clinical practice guideline (CPG) for non-specific low back pain (LBP) and to discuss its value to the management of LBP and the practice of physiotherapy.


METHODS
To mitigate an identified knowledge gap for Alberta primary-care practitioners in the management of non-specific LBP, a collaborative process was developed to engage multidisciplinary health care providers in designing a primary-care CPG for non-specific LBP. A comprehensive review of published LBP guidelines identified the seven highest-quality CPGs; these were used to inform a multidisciplinary guideline development group (GDG) as they developed the CPG.


RESULTS
The GDG constructed a CPG for non-specific LBP along with point-of-care decision-support and patient-education tools.


CONCLUSIONS
The Ambassador Program on Low Back Pain worked with front-line clinicians from across Alberta to review the best available evidence in developing a CPG responsive to the Alberta context. This CPG is intervention specific and provides a wide range of primary-care practitioners with the best available evidence to inform their clinical decisions in managing non-specific LBP.
Greg Cutforth, PT, BScPT:  Regional Manager, Allied Health Services (Jasper to Barrhead), Alberta Health Services, Hinton, Alberta.
Greg
G
Cutforth
Aaron
A
Peter
Paul
P
Taenzer
D000416:Alberta; D006801:Humans; D017116:Low Back Pain; D019095:Point-of-Care Systems; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D011320:Primary Health Care; D012046:Rehabilitation; D013673:Technology Assessment, Biomedical