Journal of the American College of Surgeons
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Many professional organizations help their members identify and use quality guidelines. Some of these efforts involve developing new guidelines, and others assess existing guidelines for their clinical usefulness. The American College of Surgeons Guidelines Program attempts to recognize useful surgical guidelines and develop research questions to help clarify existing clinical guidelines. We used existing guidelines about central venous access to develop a set of summary recommendations that could be used by practitioners to establish local best practices. ⋯ Our process combined assessing existing guidelines methodology with expert opinion to produce a best practice list of guidelines that could be fashioned into local care routines by practicing physicians. The American College of Surgeons guidelines program believes this process will help validate the clinical utility of existing guidelines and identify areas needing further investigation to determine practical validity.