Practice guidelines are everywhere. More and more organizations have developed processes to create high quality ones. But why should we care? Do they improve what we already do?
Here are my reasons for using practice guidelines:
- They provide a consistent way of approaching a clinical issue. Everybody working with the patient knows how things will be done, so they don’t have to remember the nuances that particular doctors or providers like.
- They (hopefully) use the best and most valid scientific data to address the care issue, thus giving trauma professionals the opportunity to provide the best care we know of.
- They decrease errors and complications by narrowing the number of choices available to providers.
- They decrease waste for the same reason. For example, drawing blood every 6 hours vs daily for solid organ injuries can add up to three unneeded tests every day.
- They provide our trainees with one good way to deal with the clinical issue. This is important when they move on to independent practice, and sometimes when taking standardized tests (boards).
Bottom line: If 10 trauma professionals deal with a given clinical problem 10 different ways, then none of them are doing it right! Develop a guideline that all of them can live with, based on current literature (if any). That way they can all be right for once, and our patients will reap the benefits.
The following link illustrates a protocol we developed for chest tube management. There is no literature that details when and how to remove a chest tube, so this one was hammered out by our group of trauma surgeons. We now all do it the same, and our length of stay has decreased since we eliminated much of the arbitrary variability in this process.
