Appraising clinical guidelines and the development of criteria–a pilot study

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Abstract
In the past few years there has been a remarkable rise in the publication of clinical practice guidelines in the UK. Guidelines are being produced for many conditions from a variety of sources. Increasingly, health care practitioners are encouraged to use guidelines to promote the quality and cost-effectiveness of the care they provide. Yet important questions remain unanswered. How do we judge the quality of guidelines? What criteria should we use to make that judgement? Following a national workshop, a joint programme was set up to research and develop methods for evaluating clinical practice guidelines. This paper presents the results of a pilot study on the appraisal of a number of UK published guidelines using a multidisciplinary review panel. If the introduction of guidelines is to improve the quality of care, users must be able to judge the rigour with which the guidelines have been produced. The results of this study suggest that UK guidelines are deficient in the information necessary to make this assessment. The development process of the guidelines needs to be made more transparent and more amenable to scrutiny for appraisal.