Abstract
Clinical practice guidelines are nowadays seen as a necessity in order to summarize an ever-burgeoning amount of published evidence into a simple format that practicing clinicians can read, digest and implement in order to improve a patient’s outcome. Their use has also been advocated to reduce the gap between bench and bedside, to standardize clinical practice with the avoidance of inappropriate variations, to reduce the risk of legal claims and as a tool for quality assurance. Indeed, even a cursory inspection of PubMed reveals just how vast the published evidence is. In 2009 alone, there were 7,082 papers published that are retrieved when searching on the term “critical care.” If we also consider other databases, with the knowledge that a significant issue exists concerning language bias and publication bias (Grégoire et al. 1995), the volume is even greater.
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Rhodes, A., Cecconi, M., Moreno, R. (2012). Why Guidelines Require Reform. In: Rello, J., Lipman, J., Lisboa, T. (eds) Sepsis Management. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03519-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03519-7_3
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