title: Clinical practice guidelines: based on eminence or evidence?
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Too often, clinical practice guidelines, or similar documents, are of poor quality or are eminence based. Consequently, health care decisions might be based on biased or erroneous information. Here, issues related to standards for clinical practice guidelines that ensure the inclusion of objective, transparent, and scientifically valid information will be discussed.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  To ensure the quality of guidelines, standards for the development of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines have been in development. While differences among them exist, overall, these documents emphasize the need for the establishment of transparency, management of conflicts of interest, use of a multidisciplinary development group, utilization of a systematic literature review, use of grading systems to rate the strength of evidence recommendations, articulation of recommendations, performance of an external review, and regular updating.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  No clinical practice guidelines are perfect. They vary significantly in quality and, therefore, in the trustworthiness of the yielded recommendations. Hence, it is important that one can distinguish evidence-based clinical practice guidelines from guidelines that are not based on evidence. Standards for the development of evidence-based guidelines have been developed. If strictly adhered to, this should lead to more valid and trustworthy guidelines.
authors.affiliation: Department of Paediatrics, Medical University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
authors.forename: Hania
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Szajewska
mesh_terms: D002983:Clinical Competence; D016265:Conflict of Interest; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006801:Humans; D033183:Interdisciplinary Communication; D015201:Meta-Analysis as Topic; D010380:Peer Review; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic / Q000592:standards; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians' / Q000941:ethics; D012196:Review Literature as Topic