Applied Evidence Based Medicine
Objectives
- Understand what clinical practice guidelines are and where to find them
- Be aware of resources for comparing and appraising guidelines
What are Clinical Practice Guidelines?
A clinical practice guideline is "a formal statement about a defined task or function in clinical practice, such as desirable diagnostic tests or the optimal treatment regimen for a specific diagnosis; generally based on the best available evidence (e.g. randomized controlled trials that have been assessed by a Cochrane collaborating group)".
Stedman TL. Stedman’s medical dictionary. 7th illust. ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; Clinical practice guideline; p.347.
Where to Find Guidelines
- Guidelines through ClinicalKeySelect "Guidelines" from the drop-down menu next to the search bar and search for your topic of interest.
Alberta and Canada
- Toward Optimized Practice (TOP) Clinical Practice Guidelines for AlbertaTOP is an initiative to provide Alberta's doctors with clinical practice guidelines; many of these guidelines are used in AHS.
- CPG Infobase: Clinical Practice GuidelinesA database of the Canadian Medical Association's clinical practice guidelines.
- Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care GuidelinesThe Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care was established by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) to develop clinical practice guidelines that support primary care providers in delivering preventive health care.
International
- ACP Clinical Guidelines & RecommendationsClinical practice guidelines, clinical guidance statements, and best practice advice from the American College of Physicians.
- NICE GuidanceUK guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
- Australian Clinical Practice GuidelinesDeveloped by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council to provide a single access point for clinical practice guidelines for use in Australian health care settings.
Resources for Understanding and Appraising Guidelines
- Chapter 21. In: Guyatt G, Rennie D, Meade MO, Cook DJ. eds. Users' Guides to the Medical Literature: A Manual for Evidence-Based Clinical Practice, 2nd ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill; 2008.This chapter provides an overview of clinical practice guidelines and the process of decision analysis, "a formal method that integrates the evidence regarding the beneficial and harmful effects of treatment options with the values or preferences associated with those effects." It provides instructions on how to assess recommendations and suggests how strong and weak recommendations should be used.
- Sanderlin BW, AbdulRahim N. Evidence-based medicine, part 6. An introduction to critical appraisal of clinical practice guidelines. J Am Osteopath Assoc. 2007;107(8):321-324.This article provides an introductory, step-by-step process to appraise clinical practice guidelines, including the process of assessing their validity, determining their importance, and applying them to an individual patient.
- Goldet G, Howick J. Understanding GRADE: an introduction. J Evid Based Med. 2013;6(1):50-54.The authors of this article explain the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluations) system concisely with the use of examples so that students and other researchers can understand it.
- Last Updated: Sep 6, 2023 5:34 PM
- URL: https://libguides.ucalgary.ca/guides/AEBM
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