Clinical standards in psychiatry

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Abstract
It is impossible to avoid the plethora of clinical practice guidelines and other forms of practice policy and protocols that have been showered on psychiatrists and other mental health clinicians over the last decade. Several motivations lie behind this phenomenon – reducing the amount of unnecessary variation in clinical practice, improving clinician's access to research evidence and summarising available evidence to assist individual patient and clinician decision-making. With the arrival of the National Service Framework for Mental Health, it is timely to take stock of the evidence requirements for developing valid clinical standards.