Are you stumped by searching for clinical practice guidelines for your specialty or healthcare topic? They can be tricky to find! Note that while many guidelines are freely available, you’ll find that some are behind society paywalls despite our subscription access to various resources.
We provide a number of subscription resources that can make finding clinical practice guidelines easier (follow steps here to make sure you are getting full access if you’re off-campus):
- DynaMed makes finding point of care health information speedy and painless, and is particularly helpful for providing evidence summaries and synopses of health topics. DynaMed also provides quick access to clinical guidelines when available. To access these for a given topic, navigate to the left and scroll down in the menu until you come to Guidelines. We like these because DynaMed provides international and US guidelines, and beyond (with full-text links when available). They are updated frequently.
- UpToDate also makes finding guidelines and other evidence-based information easy. Similar to DynaMed, you can find Society Guidelines linked from the navigation bar on the left for a given health topic. You can also search “society guideline + your topic” in the main search bar to go directly to the list of national and international guidelines provided by UpToDate. Full-text is provided when available.
Other places to look:
ECRI Guidelines Trust provides a clearinghouse of clinical guidelines. In some cases for guidelines listed on ECRI, you’ll be able to find ratings of how well they satisfy the IOM Standards for Trustworthy Guidelines. We recommend this feature for finding high-quality evidence-based information—around 500 of the guidelines available on ECRI have been rated. Access to ECRI is free but you’ll first need to register for an account on their homepage.
- The American Family Physician website provides handy guideline access to “commonly sought” topics in family medicine. Their topic areas are expansive, and new content is added as it becomes available. Note that guidelines from the last year will require paid access to AFP’s content.
- Guidelines are searchable on PubMed. Type your topic (such as a condition, symptom, or clinical procedure) in the search box, select “Additional filters” on the far left and check the box next to “Practice Guideline” under the section labeled “Type of Article.” Select the “Practice Guideline” box to apply the filter to your results.
This post was written by Elaina Vitale, a Research and Education Librarian for the Biomedical Libraries.
