Of more than 400 clinical practice guidelines for drug treatment of common noncommunicable diseases, fewer than 100 can be characterized as high quality based on a standard for evaluating practice guidelines, the researchers said.
The study found clinical practice guidelines were more likely to be high quality if they were developed by government institutions, had more than 20 authors, were revisions of existing documents, reported funding sources or defined a time schedule for an update.
Some factors linked to lower-quality guidelines were insufficient rigor of development, lack of applicability and underrepresentation of all relevant stakeholders in the development process.
“Primary care professionals and policymakers should be aware that [clinical practice guidelines] in primary care are of widely variable quality, with less than 25 percent of included [clinical practice guidelines] rated as high quality,” the researchers concluded.
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