Finding Information: Clinical Practice Guidelines

Clinical practice guidelines inform treating physicians about current best practices in diagnosis and treatment for a medical condition. They often also provide a lot of background disease information and details of clinical trials, so they are very useful documents.

If I'm looking specifically for Canadian clinical practice guidelines, before going to PubMed I will go to Canadian Medical Association (CMA) Infobase, which is a searchable database of guidelines "produced or endorsed in Canada by a national, provincial/territorial or regional medical or health organization, professional society, government agency or expert panel."

If no Canadian guidelines exist, or if I'm looking for USA guidelines, I will visit the National Guideline Clearinghouse or look specifically for a guideline on the approporate professional society website (ie, I will go to the Americal Psychiatric Association website to look for their guidelines on schizophrenia). For British information, I may consult their data base of clinical knowledge summaries. Or for an international approach I may visit the World Health Organization website.

For more information on finding clinical practice guidelines from a Canadian perspective, Dalhousie University has a nice Internet tutorial: Finding Clinical Practice Guidelines.