Practice guidelines: Pedantic pontification or pragmatic progress? 2003 Ryley-Jeffs memorial lecture

Abstract

Development and use of practice guidelines is one strategy to assist health professionals in translating research into practice. There has been a significant growth in the number of practice guidelines developed, with the increased focus on justifying health care costs and demonstrating outcomes. Quality and influence on established practice, however, has sometimes been lacking. Recognizing both the importance of practice guidelines and some of the controversies surrounding their quality and use, Dietitians of Canada convened a task group to make recommendations on future development. They reviewed the practice guideline programs of others and identified the key elements needed to ensure any dietetics-produced guidelines would be credible, feasible and applicable to clinical counselling, administration and community health promotion. In this memorial lecture, the chair of that task group briefly reviews the history of dietetic practice guidelines, new innovations in systematic review and consensus development methods, and specifically the Delphi process used to develop a new Dietetic Practice Guidelines Framework. The 34 elements of the framework direct overall management of the guideline development process, including topic nomination, systematic literature review, group judgment, and pilot testing.