What is a guidelines database?
A sensibly increased number of guidelines has been published during the last twenty years by health agencies, governmental bodies, scientific societies or groups of experts. The creation of a easy-to-use public database can be useful to health professionals (clinicians, managers, decision makers, etc.) who need, for various professional reasons, to identify, gather and critically evaluate existing guidelines.
Guidelines can represent a solution to the problem of producing recommendations on the basis of the results from the original available evidence, filling the gap between clinical research and clinical practice. Therefore a guideline database should be an updated and methodologically reliable instrument allowing to summarize and compare guidelines, and to critically approach their characteristics of validity and transferability. This is the objective of the National Guideline System's Guideline Database, founded by the ISS and created in collaboration with the Modena USL's CeVEAS (Center for the Evaluation of Effectiveness of Health Assistance).
The Italian guideline database, created on the basis of the American National Guideline ClearinghouseTM's (NGC) model developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in collaboration with the American Medical Association and the American Association of Health Plans, is an instrument aimed at gathering and clinically and methodologically evaluate the main documents published during the last few years. It is dedicated to researchers, but also and mainly to health professionals.
Each guideline included in the database has been evaluated, to allow a rapid and at the same time critic reading, using checklists regarding:
- the main methodological aspects
- the content of recommendations and their various implications
The two cited aspects are presented in synoptic tables having a structure that allows a comparison between the main recommendations included in the various gathered guidelines, so as to identify the aspects on which an agreement has been reached, and those on which guidelines still give ambiguous indications. Databases are easy to search, providing the option of selecting only some of the documents or only some aspects of the treated topic.
All main recommendations are available in Italian.
