Development and implementation of guidelines for family practice: lessons from The Netherlands.
Year: 1995
Type: editorial
Abstract: The development o f practice policies or clinical guidelines has recently met with great popularity in many coun tries. 1-4 National consensus development, modeled after the original National Institutes o f H ealth procedure, can be seen in Canada, Scandinavian countries, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. A more recent initiative is the clinical guideline develop ment by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) in the United States,5 Guidelines are also de veloped on a large scale by professional bodies and by regional or local groups o f care providers and other organ izations.2 Guideline setting is now considered by most policymakers and professional organizations o f care pro viders to be a priority, and essential for the improvement of the quality and efficiency in health care. A crucial question in this development is: how effec tive are all these different approaches for setting guide lines? This paper outlines a m ethod for national guideline development for family practice in the Netherlands and provides a comparison o f this m ethod with that o f the AHCPR in the United States.6-*9 In the Netherlands, na tional guidelines for family practice care have been devel oped and disseminated in a rigorous, structured manner since 1987.10-12 More than 45 o f these guidelines cover ing a wide range o f topics have been disseminated among more than 80 % o f all Dutch family physicians. Using a systematic updating program, which was started in 1991, eight to ten new topics are addressed each year. The guidelines are developed by the Dutch College of General Practitioners (N H G), the scientific organization o f family
Source: PubMed
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1520222035