INTRODUCTION This guidance document has been developed by a panel of thought and content leaders in wound care and guideline development. The authors outline simple and focused strategies for healthcare professionals to identify, appraise, implement, and evaluate clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) in their respective care settings (eg, hospital, home care, long-term care, rehabilitation facili...

Heel pain, whether plantar or posterior, is predominantly a mechanical pathology although an array of diverse pathologies including neurologic, arthritic, traumatic, neoplastic, infectious, or vascular etiologies must be considered. This clinical practice guideline (CPG) is a revision of the original 2001 document developed by the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons (ACFAS) heel pain co...

OBJECTIVE To explore family physicians' perspectives on how best to provide evidence-based preventive clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) to physicians on the Internet. DESIGN Focus groups. SETTING A large, urban centre and a rural community hospital. PARTICIPANTS Thirty-four of more than 150 family physicians who subscribed to an e-mail discussion group. METHOD Qualitative survey of fo...

The objective of this study was to conduct the systematic evaluation of methodological quality of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) in Korea. The authors conducted a very comprehensive literature search to identify potential CPGs for evaluation. CPGs were selected which were consistent with a predetermined criteria. Four reviewers evaluated the quality of the CPGs using the Appraisal of Guide...

Evidence-based clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) help guide busy practitioners in clinical decision making. CPGs are evidence-based in that recommendations are based on available knowledge derived from published clinical trials. The challenges presented by the tasks of finding, assessing, interpreting, and assembling the information in these reports are herculean. Missing or imperfect evidenc...

Physicians have an ethical responsibility to their patients to offer the best available medical care. This responsibility conflicts with their role as gatekeepers of the limited health care resources available for all patients collectively. It is ethically untenable to expect doctors to face this trade-off during each patient encounter; the physician cannot be expected to compromise the wellbei...

In 2008, physical therapists published the first neck pain clinical practice guidelines. These guidelines have been updated and are now available in the July 2017 issue of JOSPT. To update these guidelines, physical therapists teamed with the International Collaboration on Neck Pain to identify leading practices. These revised guidelines provide direction to clinicians as they screen, evaluate,...

Every day, clinicians face difficult decisions on how best to manage a given patient. Important decisions include selection of the appropriate diagnostic tests, procedures, and/or treatments to improve a patient’s outcomes. Ideally, these decisions should be informed and guided by the best medical evidence. In reality, however, clinical practice tends to be highly variable.1 Concerned that a la...

Despite enormous energies invested in authoring clinical practice guidelines, the quality of individual guidelines varies considerably. The Conference on Guideline Standardization (COGS) was convened in April 2002 to define a standard for guideline reporting that would promote guideline quality and facilitate implementation. Twenty-three people with expertise and experience in guideline develop...