title: [Evaluation of the quality of clinical practice guidelines published in the Annales de Biologie Clinique with the help of the EFLM checklist].
abstract: Several tools are available to help evaluate the quality of clinical practice guidelines (CPG). The AGREE instrument (Appraisal of guidelines for research & evaluation) is the most consensual tool but it has been designed to assess CPG methodology only. The European federation of laboratory medicine (EFLM) recently designed a check-list dedicated to laboratory medicine which is supposed to be comprehensive and which therefore makes it possible to evaluate more thoroughly the quality of CPG in laboratory medicine. In the present work we test the comprehensiveness of this check-list on a sample of CPG written in French and published in Annales de biologie clinique (ABC). Thus we show that some work remains to be achieved before a truly comprehensive check-list is designed. We also show that there is some room for improvement for the CPG published in ABC, for example regarding the fact that some of these CPG do not provide any information about allowed durations of transport and of storage of biological samples before analysis, or about standards of minimal analytical performance, or about the sensitivities or the specificities of the recommended tests.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de biochimie médicale, Centre hospitalier universitaire, Rouen, France, Groupe de veille Guidelines et EBLM de la Société française de biologie clinique (SFBC), Faculté de pharmacie, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Julien
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wils
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de biochimie métabolique, Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France, Groupe de veille Guidelines et EBLM de la Société française de biologie clinique (SFBC), Faculté de pharmacie, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Michèle
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fonfrède
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de biochimie médicale, Hôpital européen Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, Groupe de veille Guidelines et EBLM de la Société française de biologie clinique (SFBC), Faculté de pharmacie, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Augereau
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de biologie polyvalente, Hôpital Général, Villefranche-de-Rouergue, France, Groupe de veille Guidelines et EBLM de la Société française de biologie clinique (SFBC), Faculté de pharmacie, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Watine
mesh_terms: D001695:Biology; D057189:Checklist; D015510:Clinical Medicine; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic / Q000592:standards*; D011643:Publishing
keywords: clinical practice guideline; evaluation; laboratory personnel; quality improvement