Lister Hill Letter
Newsletter of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at UAB

September/October 2000

NATIONAL GUIDELINE CLEARINGHOUSE

The National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) (http://www.guideline.gov) is a web-based database of evidence based clinical practice guidelines.  A clinical practice guideline is a set of directions to help health care professionals with the diagnosis or treatment of a specific condition.  The site is sponsored by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality  (formerly the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research), in partnership with the American Medical Association and the American Association of Health Plans.
     Guidelines can be browsed by disease/condition, treatment/intervention, or organization, or can be searched using keywords.  For each guideline a summary is included, with links to full text if available.  As of this September the system contains more than 850 guidelines on topics ranging from atopic dermatitis to panic disorder.
     According to the website, "The NGC mission is to provide physicians, nurses, and other health professionals, health care providers, health plans, integrated delivery systems, purchasers and others an accessible mechanism for obtaining objective, detailed information on clinical practice guidelines and to further their dissemination, implementation and use."  This is a valuable resource that should be used by anyone involved in the delivery of healthcare.