Generated from folio-assistant-core/skills/content/folio-document-adapter/normative-statements.md — do not edit here. Typed contract: schema reference.

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normative-statements

Carry a recommendation, requirement or rule in a document folio — the thing an L1 health-policy guidance note, a standard, or a terms-of-reference document exists to state.

The problem this addresses

A normative statement is not prose. It is the block readers cite, implementers trace to, and reviewers sign off individually. It wants a label, a stable identity, and a place in the dependency graph — everything a theorem has, and nothing a paragraph of prose has.

It is also not a theorem. Nothing proves it. Its authority is the issuing body’s, not a proof’s.

What to do

Use a recommendation block: one statement per block, with a label, a title, and its strength as a code. Bean 55ao added the kind on the owner’s rulings of 2026-09-23 and 2026-10-06.

// content/<slug>/<chapter>/rec-cold-chain-audit.ts
import { recommendation } from "@folio/schemas/builders";

export default recommendation({
  label: "rec:cold-chain-audit",
  title: "Audit the cold chain quarterly",
  strength: { list: "grade-recommendation-strength", code: "conditional" },
  uses: ["rec:scope", "prose:cold-chain-terms"],
  about: ["hi:cold-chain-management"],
});

The block’s .md holds the statement itself, and its label becomes the anchor every cross-reference targets ([see](#rec:cold-chain-audit)).

• label: a prefix of your folio’s own choosing, kept consistent across the corpus. The platform reserves none (Q1): the kind’s node says prefixEnforced: false. rec: is recognised, never required. Pick a prefix once and write it down in the folio’s own AGENTS.md.
• title: the short form the document’s index and any cross-reference will show.
• strength: a code in a declared code list (Q2), not free text. Core declares two:
  • grade-recommendation-strength: strong or conditional, GRADE as the WHO handbook for guideline development applies it;
  • rfc2119-requirement-level: must, must-not, should, should-not, may, from BCP 14.

  A folio whose issuing body grades differently declares its own folio-code-list/v1 in its code-lists/ rather than editing these. The check is “resolves in the scheme”: strengthFinding in folio-assistant-core/schemas/recommendation-strength.ts. State the strength in the prose too, in the issuing body’s own words, because readers read the prose.

• uses[]: the blocks a reader must have read to act on this one. That means definitions of terms it uses, the scope statement it sits under, and the evidence summary it rests on. This is what makes “what else changes if this recommendation changes?” answerable.
• about[]: optional labels of the DAK health-interventions this recommendation is about. It is a link, not a merge (Q3): the two vocabularies stay separate, and nothing in this one depends on the DAK adapter.

Keep one statement per block. A block holding three recommendations cannot be cited, reviewed, superseded or traced individually, and splitting it later means renumbering everything that referenced it.

Converting from the interim carrier. Before the kind existed, the convention was a labelled, titled prose block. Converting one means changing the builder call from prose to recommendation and adding strength. The label, title, uses[] and .md stay as they are, so no reference breaks.

What not to do

• Do not use definition. It is a math kind: its lean field is required, so the block will not validate in a document folio at all. Earlier guidance in document-intake suggested mapping guideline recommendations onto definition — that predates the document profile and is wrong for a document folio.
• Do not use a bare prose block any more. It was the interim carrier and still validates, but no criterion can tell it is normative.
• Do not use theorem or proposition for a good-practice statement. They are outside this profile and content_profile_check rejects them.
• Do not encode the recommendation number in the label alone. Numbers are renumbered between editions; the label must survive that. Put the published number in the title or the prose.

Processes that run this skill

process	step(s) that name it
Authoring a document	4 · Author blocks