Clinical practice guidelines: On what evidence is our clinical practice based?

Abstract

Many sources of evidence inform clinical practice, including research findings, patients' views, and clinical experience. This article describes recent progress in developing what will be the College's first guideline, The Assessment and Management of Violence in Clinical Settings. The design of the programme acknowledges the diversity of evidence in this area, by drawing a distinction between different types of evidence. Evidence is systematically identified and its quality appraised by the Work Group, through commissioning literature reviews. Initial recommendations will be based on experimental data. The methods used to consider non-experimental data, particularly expert opinion, will be described in more detail in a later article in this series.