title: Analysing clinical practice guidelines. A method of documentary analysis.
abstract: This paper will describe a method of documentary analysis used in a study examining the validity of clinical guidelines issued to health visitors to assist them in identifying families requiring increased health visitor support. This forms the preliminary work for a wider study examining how health visitors decide to increase support to vulnerable families. Although a number of published research texts discuss the value of records and documents as important data sources for health service researchers, there is relatively little information available about the processes of documentary analysis. This paper offers one method for analysing clinical practice guidelines, it describes the development of a critique and analysis tool and explores the strengths and weaknesses of this particular analysis instrument.
authors.affiliation: School of Health and Human Sciences, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, England.
authors.forename: J V
authors.initials: JV
authors.lastname: Appleton
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Cowley
mesh_terms: D003152:Community Health Nursing; D003628:Database Management Systems; D004282:Documentation; D004739:England; D006801:Humans; D015403:Nursing Evaluation Research / Q000379:methods*; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires