For a person to become a doctor, extensive professional training is required. University is compulsory because it is the place where you learn the basics of the theoretical part. While the boarding school and social service are a complement to put into practice all the teachings. In addition, there are also documents that you should know and consult frequently and within them are the Clinical Practice Guidelines.
Sometimes there is the erroneous belief that they are only useful for general practitioners who are going to present the National Examination of Applicants for Medical Residencies (ENARM) but it is not. In fact, anyone should review these documents because they are the basis for knowing how to treat multiple diseases and conditions in patients.
Currently there are 818 Clinical Practice Guidelines and their general objective is to help improve the quality of decisions within the practice. All are prepared by the National Center for Technological Excellence in Health (Cenetec) and here you can consult the current catalog. By containing explicit recommendations, they are an instrument that facilitates patient care. In addition, they are constantly updated and they publish new ones with recent information. But just as they offer some positives, there are also others that cause discomfort in the medical community. We will analyze both items below.
Advantage
They improve decision-making for medical personnel by showing specific cases and how to act based on existing scientific evidence.
They are the greatest tool physicians have to defend against potential negligence lawsuits. If you act according to what is indicated in the documents, you will keep yourself protected.
In addition, they not only offer advantages to doctors but to the entire health system. With its implementation, hospital costs, prescription drugs and surgeries performed on patients can be reduced. This means less expense for hospitals and faster recovery for patients.
By standardizing medical care, the aim is to offer the same quality of service to all patients equally, regardless of where or by whom they are treated.
Disadvantages
The limitation of the guidelines is that the recommendations mentioned may be wrong. This is because they are based on generality and not on individual cases. Derived from the above is that the scientific evidence can be misleading or misinterpreted. It all depends on the evaluator.
Likewise, the recommendations may be influenced by the opinion, clinical experience and composition of the development group of each guideline.
Although one of the objectives of the guidelines is that they seek to standardize care, it should be mentioned that not all patients are the same. That is why it is a double-edged sword that can be both positive and negative.
Finally, the biggest disadvantage of some guides, although not all, is that they age very quickly. This means that they must be constantly updated due to the advances offered by technology and the new discoveries that are made.