Clinical Practice Guideline Dissemination and Implementation Strategies for Healthcare Teams and Team-Based Practice: a systematic review.

Abstract

Review objective: The objective of this systematic review is to identify the effectiveness of different clinical practice guideline implementation strategies on team-based practice and/or patient outcomes. Inclusion criteria: Types of participants: This review will investigate studies concerning health care teams who collaborate in an active or proactive way. Studies involving multiple professions who simply follow the same guideline will be excluded from the review. This review will consider studies that include team-based practices, i.e. practices including two or more professions or disciplines (for example medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, physical therapy, dietetics/nutrition, speech language therapy, social work, dentists/hygienists, laboratory services, pharmacy, health administration). Types of intervention(s)/phenomena of interest: This review will consider studies that evaluate the implementation and/or dissemination of clinical practice guidelines. For this review the definition of clinical practice guidelines is broad and does not require that term to be explicitly stated. For inclusion in this review, clinical practice guidelines are considered to be any systematically developed statements used to assist practitioner and patient decisions about appropriate health care for specific clinical circumstances. Types of outcome measures: This review will consider studies that include the following outcome measures: any objective measure of change in provider behaviour and/or patient outcome resulting from the assimilation of the clinical practice guideline specific to the implementation/ dissemination strategy.