Tools such as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analyses; checklists; context-adapted protocols; and fact sheets are very simple methods to facilitate implementation.
In reporting the results we followed the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) checklist 45.
The review protocol is available in the Web Appendix (posted at http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/), including the completed PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) checklist (24).
We followed the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) checklist for reporting systematic reviews and meta-analyses (6).
The PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses) checklist was used to critically appraise the quality of reporting of the included benchmark review papers.
We followed the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) checklist for reporting systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
We also followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses checklist as close as possible 7 to the extent that it was applicable to concept analysis which is descriptive synthesis of the literature.
Post hoc analyses between checklist or physician diagnosis of VAP and microbial growth (infected or colonised sputum) provided no significant associations, with the small number of identified VAP cases who received microbiological sputum reports precluding further analyses (see online supplementary additional file 3 for further details).
We followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) checklist for reporting systematic reviews and meta-analyses (11).
We followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) checklist for reporting systematic reviews and meta-analyses (14).
The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) checklist guided the extraction and reporting of data.
