The RCOG produces a series of clinical Green-top Guidelines. The procedure for developing these guidelines has evolved from being one of informal consensus opinion to being evidence based.
Clinical guidelines are an increasingly familiar part of clinical practice. Their principal aim is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of clinical care through the identification of good clinical practice and desired clinical outcomes.
Green-top Guidelines provide systematically developed recommendations which assist clinicians and patients in making decisions about appropriate treatment for specific conditions. They are concise documents, providing specific practice recommendations on focused areas of clinical practice.
This document outlines the policies and processes used in the production of Green-top Guidelines. It covers the following topics:
- Selection of guideline topics
- Selection of guideline lead developers
- Guideline development
- Guideline criteria
- Consumer involvement
- Peer review process
- Support structure for guideline lead developers
- Parallel patient information
- Archiving
- Citations
The aim of this series of four documents is to assist and guide those developing Green-top Guidelines and support implementation.