Importance of clinical practice guidelines in anesthesia: Who is responsible for implementing it?

Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) incorporate and support clinical decisions. CPGs can improve clinicians’ and patients’ decision-making by explicitly describing and evaluating the scientific evidence, based on the potential benefits and risks underpinning clinical recommendations, making them relevant to the specific patient encounter. The number of clinical research publications have increased to the point that new medical knowledge is expected to be double every 72 days. Consequently, clinicians depend heavily on the available evidence that has been condensed into clinical CPGs by the representative institutions or societies. CPGs can have potential benefits and harms. Different groups have different opinions on whether clinical recommendations are useful or bad for medicine considering these contradictory effects. Though guidelines that are carefully prepared and supported by research reduce the potential risks; however, in our country CPGs have not yet been used in full potential and it is still a gray area.