Abstract
The participation of service users and the public in the development of clinical guidelines is increasingly valued in international guideline programmes. This paper extends the findings of Harding et al.'s (2010) exploration of the views of service users who participated in developing NICE mental health guidelines. This analysis considered the relative value of personal versus professional knowledge and experience, the barriers to service users contributing effectively in guideline development, the unspoken ‘rules’ concerning decision making, and issues of power and group dynamics. We combine these insights with observations from research in guideline development and with advances in the recovery movement and in the shared decision-making clinical model to suggest areas of improvement in guideline development, notably: translating evidence to recommendations, optimizing the acceptability of treatment recommendations to service users, and reconciling different types of knowledge.