Results (
Thai) 2:
[Copy]Copied!
The past decade has been marked by unprecedented interest in clinical practice guidelines and the processes by which they can best be developed and implemented. This worldwide interest has been prompted by concern about unjustifiable variations in clinical practice for the same condition, the increasing availability of new treatments and technologies, uncertainty about the effectiveness of many interventions in improving people’s health, and a desire to make the best use of available health resources.
Guidelines are being designed to improve the quality of health care and decrease the use of unnecessary, ineffective or harmful interventions. In an era of evidence-based medicine (Sackett et al. 1996), guidelines are becoming one of the critical links between the best available evidence and good clinical practice. Guidelines constitute one element of a systems approach to quality health care.
Despite the acknowledged need, there are few widely accessible, comprehensive guides for groups seeking to develop clinical practice guidelines. This document puts forward a method for developing clinical practice guidelines in Australia, based on the best available models worldwide. The method has been trialed in Australia in recent years and modified in the light of that experience; it is applicable to a variety of conditions and procedures. In this document the term ‘clinical’ takes in all health care providers.
1.1 Clinical practice guidelines
Clinical practice guidelines are ‘systematically developed statements to assist practitioner and patient decisions about appropriate health care for specific clinical circumstances’ (Field & Lohr 1990). There is a move towards developing such statements to assist clinicians in the management of specific conditions. The procedures used to develop the statements are increasingly based on a thorough evaluation of the evidence, including, when appropriate, meta-analysis of published research studies on the outcomes of various treatment options, rather than the consensus of expert panels. The statements are intended to be ‘a distillation of current evidence and opinion on best practice’ (Clover et al. 1995; Grimshaw & Russell 1993).
Clinical practice guidelines are often referred to as algorithms, clinical pathways, protocols and practice policies, although these differ from clinical practice guidelines in that they are often much more prescriptive and not always based on evidence.
Being translated, please wait..
