Background:

To describe a process for adapting a supportive care clinical practice guideline (CPG) for use in a middle income country setting.

Method:

We reviewed different approaches for CPG adaptation and created a straight-forward approach for adapting supportive care guidelines for use in Shenzhen, China. The initial CPG to be adapted was for the empiric management of fever and neutropenia (FN) in children with cancer and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation recipients.

Results:

The steps to be used in adaptation were as follows: review of local guideline; understanding local clinical pathways and contexts through interviews; development of worksheets to facilitate adaptation decisions; deliberation of guideline recommendations in focus groups; and drafting of the adapted FN CPG. After several iterations, stakeholders agreed upon a final adapted guideline.

Conclusions:

We described an approach to adaptation of a supportive care CPG for the middle income country setting of Shenzhen, China. Although we believe this work has broad applicability, this approach requires rigorous evaluation, both in terms of methodology and the validity of the adapted guideline. Future work will evaluate implementation of the adapted CPG (AU)