Clinical Guidelines in internet: how to retrieve the important

Clinical guidelines are systematically developed statements to assist practitioner and patient decisions about appropriate health care for specific clinical circumstances. Current methods for developing practice guidelines include informal consensus development, formal consensus development, and evidence-based guideline development. The key elements of the methodology are (a) that guidelines are developed by multidisciplinary groups; (b) they are based on a systematic review of the scientific evidence; and (c) recommendations are explicitly linked to the supporting evidence and graded according to the strength of that evidence. Guideline developers must make a considered judgment about the generalisability, applicability, consistency, and clinical impact of the recommendations. Searches for guidelines may start covering Internet sites that develop good quality evidence- based clinical guidelines. Only if the search didn?t find the answer you need, you would carry out an extensive search to identify other resources on the web, and Medline in the final step, but then a critical appraisal is needed. The ?Users' guides to the Medical Literature? and the ?AGREE instrument? can be used to help make an informed judgement about the overall quality and methods that were used to develop a guideline. We undertook a hypothetical search to retrieve a good guideline focused on asthma in children.