There is an interesting article in the Psychiatric Times, Do Physicians Use Practice Guidelines. For the past 25 years clinincal practice guidelines have been considered to be the gold standard of care for physicians to treat patients. However, are doctors using these guidelins when they are treating their patients?

This article looks at the barriers physicians encounter to using clinical practice guidelines, possible problems with quality of the guidelines themselves, and finally resolving the barriers to clinical practice guideline use.

Some statistics you might find interesting:

• In a survey of 1878 Canadian physicians, only 52% resported they used practice guidelines at least once a month.
• More than 25% of those Canadian physicians had concernse over the guidelines' source and that they were too rigid.
• A survey of 34 general practioners in England found that some physicians did not think the data used for the guideliens applied to their patients.
• Other reasons for not using practice guidelines were they were thought to be outdated, lack of ownership toward the guidelines, lack of knowledge about the guidelines, or financial pressures made treatment using the guidelines a low priority.