• Marjolein Moleman, Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent, Hester van de Bovenkamp, Roland Bal, and Teun Zuiderent-Jerak.
• Faculty of Science, Athena Institute, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
• J Eval Clin Pract. 2022 Dec 1; 28 (6): 100310261003-1026.

BackgroundClinical practice guidelines (CPGs) have become central to efforts to change clinical practice and improve the quality of health care. Despite growing attention for rigorous development methodologies, it remains unclear what contribution CPGs make to quality improvement.AimThis mixed methods study examines guideline quality in relation to the availability of certain types of evidence and reflects on the implications of CPGs' promise to improve the quality of care practices.MethodsThe quality of 62 CPGs was assessed with the Appraisal of Guidelines, Research, and Evaluation (AGREE) instrument. Findings were discussed in 19 follow-up interviews to examine how different quality aspects were considered during development.ResultsThe AGREE assessment showed that while some quality criteria were met, CPGs have limited coverage of domains such as stakeholder involvement and applicability, which generally lack a 'strong' evidence base (e.g., randomized controlled trials [RCT]). Qualitative findings uncovered barriers that impede the consolidation of evidence-based guideline development and quality improvement including guideline scoping based on the patient-intervention-comparison-outcome (PICO) question format and a lack of clinical experts involved in evidence appraisal. Developers used workarounds to include quality considerations that lack a strong base of RCT evidence, which often ended up in separate documents or appendices.ConclusionFindings suggest that CPGs mostly fail to integrate different epistemologies needed to inform the quality improvement of clinical practice. To bring CPGs closer to their promise, guideline scoping should maintain a focus on the most pertinent quality issues that point developers toward the most fitting knowledge for the question at hand, stretching beyond the PICO format. To address questions that lack a strong evidence base, developers actually need to appeal to other sources of knowledge, such as quality improvement, expert opinion, and best practices. Further research is needed to develop methods for the robust inclusion of other types of knowledge.© 2022 The Authors. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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