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Barwon Health Library Service: Clinical Procedure Development

Evidence for Excellence

Three Approaches to Clinical Procedures Development

Procedures are important for high quality care. Procedures can be developed, or updated, in three ways:

  1.  Adapt an existing procedure from a high quality external resource. This can significantly reduce the time involved while still resulting in a current evidence-based procedure.
  2.  Adapt an existing procedure from other Victorian Health Services (via Prompt). As with 1, this can be an efficient  approach.
  3.  Develop a procedure anew

Refer to the Publishing a document on PROMPT - Resource Information - 10 Principles for Developing/Reviewing/Updating PROMPT documents for more information

1. Adapt an existing procedure from a high quality external resource

You can search reputable resources that contain evidence based procedures and customise as required to suit local conditions

  • ​Clinical Guidelines
    • Good sources of existing clinical guidelines include specialty Society sites. NICE Guidance / Pathways can be useful. You can also find clinical guidelines via UpToDate (Search for a topic and find Society Guideline Links near the bottom of the Topic Outline), BMJ Best Practice (Search for a specific topic and find Guidelines in the Resources section), TRIP (Search for a topic and find Guidelines under Evidence Type on the right.). All of these allow refinement by geographic region so you can find Australian guidelines.
  • JBI EBP Database
    • JBI is an Australian source of evidence. It is primarily for nursing but also covers allied Health and medicine. Click on Recommended Practices (in the white box labelled Publication Types) to limit to Procedures. Evidence Summaries are also useful.
  • UpToDate / BMJ Best Practice
    • As well as being a source of clinical guidelines as above, these resources also provide evidence based summaries of clinical topics that are regularly updated.

TIP - the resources above (and more) have patient handouts. In a similar fashion, you can use such handouts when developing a patient handout for Barwon Health. Remember that all information viewed by consumers needs to be submitted to WISE

2. Adapt an existing procedure from other Victorian Health

PROMPT which stores policies and procedures, is used by approximately 100 Victorian health services.

You can search for the procedures developed by other health services by following these instructions

Important - just because it is an existing procedure of another health service doesn't mean it is necessarily of high quality

 

3. Develop a Procedure Anew

If you cannot find an existing high quality procedure to adapt, then you need to develop your procedure by searching for evidence based information or asking a librarian to do this for you.

Book a consultation with a librarian for further help with your literature searching

Request a Literature Search - Barwon Health staff may request literature searches for Barwon health policy/protocol development