Development of clinical guidelines

There is a great deal of interest worldwide in clinical guidelines as a means of assisting practitioner and patient decision making about care options and in improving the quality of the care provided. Confusion remains over what is meant by a clinical guideline and how it differs from and relates to protocols. The aim of this paper is the description of the scientific development of clinical guidelines based on current literature, so that, nurses will have a flexible tool for monitoring their clinical practice by providing nursing care. The method for clinical guidelines development has the following stages: identifying and refining the subject area of a guideline, formation of group for guideline development, systematic reviewing of the research literature, translating evidence into a clinical practice guideline, identifying and assessing the evidence, development of recommendations for practice from research evidence, monitoring guideline implementation, pilot testing of the clinical guideline, reviewing and updating guidelines. The development of clinical guidelines is not an easy process. Nevertheless, health professionals own to realize the importance of their implementation, because these constitute a flexible tool for providing qualitative health care, promoting clinical practice and limiting their divergence from current scientific data.

Category: Volume 46, N 1
Hits: 1072 Hits
Created Date: 15-03-2007
Authors: Maria Kalafati , Thalia Bellali , Maria Hatzopoulou , Heleni Fytrou , Alexandra Koreli , Aikaterini Hliopoulou