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Challenges for an international guidelines collaboration

Correspondence to:
Professor R Thomson
School of Population and Health Sciences, Newcastle University Medical School, and Director of Epidemiology and Research, National Patient Safety Agency, London, UK; richard.thomson@newcastle.ac.uk

Keywords: guidelines; international cooperation; evidence based medicine

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The emergence of evidence based guidelines may be one of the great successes of the evidence based medicine movement. We now have a mature process of development using literature review and appraisal, aligning strength of evidence and grading of recommendations. This has become an international movement and this global expansion is reflected in the development of the Guidelines International Network reported in this issue of QSHC.¹

There have, indeed, been considerable successes, perhaps exemplified by the groundbreaking work of the National Institute of Clinical Excellence in the UK, building on earlier crafting of structured evidence based guidelines methods.^2,3 This industry was fashioned on the background of concerns about unexplained variations in practice and on the exponential growth of information with the problem for clinicians of remaining up to date with reading and assimilating the immense literature, let alone being able to appraise or assess it.⁴ Studies had . . . [Full text of this article]