[Quality of the pharmacotherapeutic recommendations for the integrated care procedures in Andalusia].
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the quality of the pharmacotherapeutic recommendations included in the Integrated Care Procedures (PAIs regarding its initials in Spanish) of the Andalusian Ministry of Health, published up to March 2008, through the design and validation of a tool.


METHODS
The assessment tool was designed based on similar instruments, specifically the AGREE. Other criteria included were taken from various literature sources or were devised by ourselves. The tool was validated prior to being used. After applying it to all the PAIs, we examined the degree of compliance with these pharmacotherapeutic criteria, both as a whole and by PAIs subgroups.


RESULTS
The developed tool is a questionnaire of 20 items, divided into 4 sections. The first section consists of the essential criteria, and the rest make reference to more specific, non essential criteria: definition of the level of evidence, thoroughness of information and definition of indicators. It was found that 4 of the 60 PAIs do not contain any type of therapeutic recommendation. No PAI fulfils all the items listed in the tool, however, 70 % of them fulfil the essential quality criteria established.


CONCLUSIONS
There is a great variability in the content of pharmacotherapeutic recommendations for each PAI. Once the validity of the tool has been proved, it could be used to assess the quality of the therapeutic recommendations in clinical practice guidelines.
Corte
Rosa María Muñoz
RM
Hospitales Universitarios Virgen del Rocío, Sevilla, España. rmunozdelacorte@yahoo.es
Estepa
Raúl García
RG
Ramos
Bernardo Santos
BS
Paloma
Francisco Javier Bautista
FJ
D004358:Drug Therapy / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic / Q000592:standards*; D013030:Spain; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires