Understanding Clinical Practice Guidelines

• A Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG) is a set of evidence-based recommendations, which take into account the quality of the evidence and the benefit-risk relation of the alternative care options to treat and/or diagnose patients.
• CPGs are tools to help health professionals in the clinical decision-making, in an effort to reduce variability in clinical practice and improve the quality and safety of patients.
• There are other evidence-based guidelines that are not GPCs, mainly because of the methodology used for their elaboration; some examples are the Care Processes, Protocols, Clinical Pathways, Experts’ Consensus, etc.
• The quality of a CPG depends on the methodology followed in the elaboration of the document, being the formulation of PICO questions, search and selection of evidence, and evaluation and synthesis of the evidence found very important.
• Recommendations of a CPG can be strong, correlated with greater confidence; or weak, which means less confidence.
• It is advisable to update CPGs at least once every five years as their recommendations may become outdated.
• It is important to know that there are tools for assessing the quality of CPGs (AGREE II) and for adapting guidelines to specific practice settings (Guideline International Network -GIN).