Final WHO Guidance Document on Good Data and Record Management Practices

We recently informed you about the WHO Draft Guidance on Good Data and Record Management Practices. Now, the WHO has just released the  the final version of this important guideline "Good Data and Record Management Practices".

The final version is sectioned rather similar to the draft version:

- Introduction
- Aims and objectives of this guidance
- Glossary
- Principles
- Quality risk management to ensure good data management
- Management governance and quality audits
- Contracted organizations, suppliers and service providers
- Training in good data and record management
- Good documentation practices
- Designing and validation systems to assure data quality and reliability
- Managing data and records throughout  the data lifecycle
- Addressing data reliability issues
- References and further reading

Although the individual chapters were kept rather unchained the content of these chapters was updated throughout the whole document.

For instance the term "good documentation practices" has now been expanded to "good data and record management practices" and is defined as follows in the glossary:

"The totality of organized measures that should be in place to collectively and individually ensure that data and records are secure, attributable, legible, traceable, permanent, contemporaneously recorded, original and accurate and that if not robustly implemented can impact on data reliability and completeness and undermine the robustness of decision-making based upon those data records."

Some of the former content has been put into Appendix 1 now: Here you can find expectations and examples of special risk management considerations for the implementation of ALCOA (-plus) principles in paper-based and electronic systems. The tables in this appendix provide further guidance on the implementation of the general ALCOA requirements. In addition, examples of special risk management considerations as well as several illustrative examples are provided of how these measures are typically implemented.

However, these examples should not be taken as setting new normative requirements.

For further information please see the final WHO Guidance on Good Data and Record Management Practices.