Developing national best practice recommendations for harm reduction programmes: Lessons learned from a community-based project

Through promotion of consistent, evidence-based policy and practice, best practice recommendations can improve service delivery. Nationally relevant best practice recommendations, including guidance for programmes that provide service to people who use drugs, are often created and disseminated by government departments or other national organisations. However, funding priorities do not always align with stakeholder- and community-identified needs for such recommendations, particularly in the case of harm reduction. We achieved success in developing and widely disseminating best practice documents for Canadian harm reduction programmes by bringing together a multi-stakeholder, cross-regional team of people with relevant and diverse experience and expertise. In this commentary, we summarise key elements of our experience to contribute to the literature more detailed and transparent dialogue about team processes that hold much promise for developing best practice resources. We describe our project's community-based principles and process of working together (e.g., regularly scheduled teleconferences to overcome geographic distance and facilitate engagement), and integrate post-project insights shared by our team members. Although we missed some opportunities for power-sharing with our community partners, overall team members expressed that the project offered them valuable opportunities to learn from each other. We aim to provide practical considerations for researchers, other stakeholders, and community members who are planning or already engaged in a process of developing best practice recommendations for programmes and interventions that address drug use.