Clinical Evidence Made Easy by M. Harris G. Taylor D. Jackson

Author:M. Harris, G. Taylor, D. Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scion Publishing

Guideline design

Guideline development groups often include key experts and stakeholders. For instance, a group interested in prevention of heart disease might consist of a general practitioner, a cardiologist, a patient, a statistician and a public health expert.

The team then needs to define the clinical scope clearly: is it interested in primary, secondary or tertiary prevention of heart disease, for example? If secondary prevention, should it focus on a single area, for instance medication, use of investigations or promotion of a healthy lifestyle?

The next steps are to work out what the key decision points for clinicians are, and to find, appraise and collate all the relevant evidence that is needed to provide recommendations. This needs a rigorous, systematic search for evidence, then a careful assessment of each piece of evidence:

is it relevant?

where does it fit in the hierarchy of evidence (see Chapter 4), for instance was it a well-designed RCT with a large sample population, a case–control study or simply expert opinion?

are the results of each individual piece of research consistent with those of other studies that looked at the same subject area, or is there a lack of consensus?

is the evidence strong enough to justify a recommendation?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.