Clinical Practice Guidelines

Clinical Practice Guidelines

Introduction

The Institute of Medicine of the United States, defined it as a set of "systematically developed recommendations to assist practitioners and patients in making health care decisions most appropriate, and select options diagnostic and / or most appropriate therapeutic approach of a health problem or a specific clinical condition. The World Health Organization (WHO) says these guidelines "are systematically developed reports for evidence-based care providers, recipients and other organizations for making decisions about the most appropriate health interventions (Rivera, 2003).

Clinical practice guideline is useful to improving consistency in clinical practice because of the following benefits.

Impact area

Benefits

Quality of care

To improve health outcomes

Reduce the variability of care

To promote the abandonment of harmful treatments, obsolete and generate

unjustified costs

Provide scientific information to healthcare

Provide a basis for the development of quality indicators

Dissemination of knowledge scientists

Providing information to the physician and patient (including damages and costs) select the best choice in an informed

Disseminate findings of medical research when incorporated into the recommendations of the GPC

Identify gaps in research design and ethical aspects studies

Identify the major areas of uncertainty to give a new direction of the research

Support the education and training of medical resources

Health Policies

Provide items to users (health care team and patients) to:

Influence public policy

Call attention to unrecognized health problems

Implement preventive interventions in high risk groups

Health Economics

1. Promote efficiency by optimizing the use of resources (money and time)

Improve the distribution of resources by eliminating non-effective actions that generate unnecessary costs and reassign them to the most cost-effective

Legal

Protect medical claims for "malpractice"

Document the medical decision to managers, peers and budgeting purposes

Clinical practice guideline is useful to improving consistency in clinical practice because these clinical practice guidelines have been developed to improve the quality of care, reduce variations in practice and optimize resource utilization. In fact, practice guidelines are intended to focus a significant medical expertise in a convenient and ready to use. The guides of good quality are built from a synthesis of the best and latest scientific evidence. We can supplement them with systematic reviews of evidence-based practice (evidence-based). However, all guides are not the same level of quality (Wilson, 2007). This may depend on the method or policies followed in their development.

Scientific evidence underlying the recommendation may be missing or have been misinterpreted. The recommendations may be influenced by ...