Paper: Developing clinical guidelines - excellent set of papers

Here is a paper (series of three) from authors who are experts in this field. I've always been a bit ambivalent as to whether guidelines actually work - in terms of changing behaviour. I'm still not convinced but it's good to see a bit more work being done to identify the target audiences for guidelines as well as considering conflicts of interest etc.  Getting them right is a lot more complex than just collating what seems to be best practice, writing it up and then distributing them widely.

Oh, and the full text of the papers is free - that's nice. http://www.implementationscience.com/series/ClinPracGuidelines

Developing clinical practice guidelines

Edited by: Prof Martin Eccles, Dr Paul Shekelle 

Collection published: 4 July 2012

These articles describe the state of the art in developing clinical practice guidelines. As well as updating on established areas, such as evidence review and group composition, they also address contentious areas - conflicts of interest - and new and emerging topics including updating guidelines, dealing with co-morbidities and guideline implementability.

(Picture and text above is from the Implementation Science Webpage)