Assessing the effectiveness of strategies to implement clinical guidelines for the management of chronic diseases at primary care level in EU Member States: A systematic review

Utilization of the American Telemedicine Association's Clinical Practice Guidelines

“…For example, a recent review was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of strategies to implement clinical guidelines for chronic disease management in primary care in European Union member states. 14 The authors searched five databases for studies focusing on the management of chronic diseases in adults in primary care and found a total of 21 studies that fit their selection criteria. They found that the implementation strategy was fully effective in only four (19%), partially effective in eight (38%), and not effective in nine (43%) of the reports.…”

Advancing evidence-based practice in primary care physiotherapy : Guideline implementation, clinical practice, and patient preferences

“…Most of the strategies were multi-component and included education and print material. Brusamento et al focused on management of chronic diseases in primary care, and found guideline implementation strategies fully or partially effective in 12 of the 21 included studies, but ineffective in 9 studies [85]. Although multifaceted strategies appeared somewhat more effective than single-component strategies, the authors were not able to determine the most successful strategy due to varied effect sizes across studies.…”

“…An overview of systematic reviews by Boaz et al [90] found multi-component interventions to be more effective than single interventions, with effect sizes ranging from small to moderate. Several other systematic reviews also support the effectiveness of active, multi-component strategies to implement change in professional behaviour [56,85,[91][92][93][94]. Hence, evidence is inconclusive regarding multi-component versus single-component strategies.…”

Dealing with chronic disease – The role of structured programmes and guidelines

“…It consists of five dimensions: regulatory basis, development, quality control, implementation and evaluation of clinical guidelines [3]. This is followed by two systematic reviews, one on the methodological quality of clinical guideline development along the dimensions of the Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation (AGREE) instrument [4] and one on the effectiveness of strategies to implement clinical guidelines [5].…”

“…These results reveal once more that there are only a few rigorous studies which assess the effectiveness of a strategy to implement clinical guidelines in Europe. Therefore, "further research is needed to develop more rigorous studies to evaluate health outcomes associated with the implementation of clinical guidelines; to assess the cost-effectiveness of implementing clinical guidelines; and to investigate the perspective of service users and health service staff [5]." Needless to say that these issues fit the scope of Health Policy very well -so we are looking forward to receiving manuscripts helping to close the gap for evidence-based health policy-making in the area of tackling chronic disease.…”