Each doctor treats people, relying not only on his professionalism, but also on clinical recommendations that state what the doctor should do in a given situation. Thanks to such recommendations, a specialist can correctly choose a diagnostic procedure, screening tests, therapeutic methods and accurately indicate how much a patient can be in a hospital or at home treatment.
Clinical recommendations: what is it?
This is a regularly compiled collection of official guidelines that help practitioners and patients make serious decisions about adequate treatment in institutions. Today, there are a huge number of prescriptions for a doctor working in a particular area. Every year there are more and more of them, as new methods of treatment or diagnosis appear.
If the doctor finds himself in a very difficult situation and does not know what decision to make in a particular case, then thanks to the collection of provisions he can find a way out and offer the patient acceptable treatment measures.
What are the objectives of official regulations?
Today, clinical recommendations allow the doctor to find an adequate way out of this situation, since this:
- Providing the correct answer to a particular question using evidence-based medicine.
- Assistance to a specialist in making the right decision.
- The designation of standards in treatment, in this way it is possible to ensure high-quality equitable access to medical services.
- Creating the best value for money with limited resources.
- Stimulation of medical workers and patients for training.
The main goal of clinical prescriptions is to provide the doctor with information to help you choose the best method of therapy and research. Clinical recommendations for diagnosis and treatment allow you to find a strategy for leading the patient to recovery and make it possible to exclude the possible risk of incorrectly prescribed therapy.
How are recommendations for doctors created?
As the amount of information for practicing physicians, the number of medical and diagnostic interventions is growing every year, the doctor must spend a large amount of time and effort searching, analyzing and applying this information. At the time of creating the recommendations, the most difficult steps have already been completed by the authors, everything is laid out in chapters, and the doctor will be able to quickly find the right answer to a rather difficult question.
Clinical recommendations are a kind of tool of a doctor working in any direction, which helps to narrow the gap between the routine and the level of modern medicine. The doctor should spend time on treating patients, and not on finding information. Thanks to such collections, where everything is clearly described, he will be able to quickly find the section that is needed, and a clear answer to the question.
Pros and Cons of Clinical Recommendations
The use of clinical recommendations allows you to achieve evidence-based medicine in clinical practice and makes it possible to significantly improve the prognosis of the course of the pathology, reduces the number of difficult and incurable situations.
The main drawback of the recommendations is that they are not widely used in Russian healthcare. There are many difficulties in transferring research results into practice; it is not always possible to apply this or that advice in a particular case.
But the main plus is that thanks to all these definitions, it is possible to significantly reduce patient mortality and improve disease prognosis. Fulfilling the clinical recommendations for treatment, it is possible to provide the patient with an identical amount of medical care, regardless of who and where the services are provided to him. But for doctors, these recommendations will improve the effectiveness of therapy in the most complex and sometimes insoluble cases.
Clinical recommendations in pediatrics
For each separate field of medicine: cardiology, surgery and others - recommendations are written and developed. They did not bypass pediatrics. Clinical recommendations for the treatment of children contain a huge number of decisions in the treatment of common childhood diseases, all of them prepared by the Union of Pediatricians. They include the doctor’s algorithms for the diagnosis, therapy, prevention and rehabilitation of small patients.
Thanks to this, the doctor can quickly make an informed decision in the most severe cases. This collection allows you to find the right solution and apply an adequate treatment option, which is very important in the most difficult situations. Especially in cases where a parent's decision to carry out a particular procedure is required. Indeed, very often it is the parents who do not understand the seriousness of the situation and can, if they evaluate it incorrectly, unknowingly harm their baby.
Features recommendations in the diagnosis
Before you make an accurate diagnosis to the patient, you need to conduct a series of studies, and only thanks to their help you can determine the cause of the pathology. To facilitate the choice of study in a particular case, clinical guidelines for diagnosis have been developed. It is thanks to this assistant that you can accurately find out which of the diagnostic methods will be appropriate for the symptoms described by the patient.
It is also very important that such collections help if the patient doubts that he needs to undergo the type of diagnosis that was prescribed. New diagnostic methods appear regularly, and thanks to the collection of recommendations, the doctor can improve qualifications and learn about the latest.
Proper patient management
Very often, the patient, referring to the doctor, cannot correctly explain the symptoms of the disease, so the doctor must immediately grasp the essence of the complaint and prescribe the correct diagnostic methods, and after them make a diagnosis and start treatment. The medical history of the patient begins from the moment the patient crossed the threshold of the doctor’s office.
Correctly keeping a patient’s medical history is very important, since the card is started for many years, and very important points can further help doctors in solving complex problems. Clinical recommendations for patient management will help the doctor fill out the card correctly, prescribe a course of treatment, and choose the place of treatment: a hospital or home conditions. And also write a sick leave without violating any standards.
Health Care Standards
Standards are a formalized description in the form of a table of the minimum necessary amount of medical care that is provided to a patient with a certain form of the disease. The main task adhered to by those who created clinical recommendations and patient management standards was:
- Justification of the list of drugs that are dispensed by prescription.
- Determining the amount of qualified care by a medical professional in order to accurately determine the costs of its provision.
To determine the exact standards, qualified specialists were involved. They helped to accurately determine the structure of the standard and identify all the necessary categories by which the type of disease and type of therapy are determined.
What does the structure of the standard look like?
Each standard first of all begins with a patient model, which must be maintained according to the presented plan. The standard model includes patient characteristics that determine the tactics of diagnostic studies and treatment methods:
- The name of the nosological form or syndrome.
- ICD-10 code.
- The phase of the pathology and stage in those cases when it is necessary.
- Possible complications, if any, may occur, or their absence.
A standard can consist of either one model or several. For each of them, the patient is determined by the conditions for the provision of services in a hospital or on an outpatient basis, and recommendations for diagnosis, prevention, treatment and rehabilitation are also prescribed.
The standard can also indicate both simple services of a medical institution, such as measuring body weight, protein content in urine, and very complex ones - the initial appointment of a specialist. Each inspection is deciphered in its own way in accordance with the prescribed definitions.
If the doctor is new or forgot how everything is made out, then he can at any time take advantage of the clinical recommendations, which are also often updated with new standards, and fill in everything in accordance with the rules. For any of the areas of medicine, there are standards and recommendations that are regularly updated with new, more advanced methods of diagnosis and treatment. The patient can take advantage of these recommendations if he has doubts about the correctness of the doctor’s therapy or for the correct choice of further rehabilitation.