General Practitioners' Views of Clinical Guidelines for the Management of Asthma

Abstract

Objectives—To assess the views of GPs on the value of clinical guidelines for the management of asthma. Design—Structured questionnaire survey. Setting—Bromley Health District. Subjects—All (160) GPs in health district. Main outcome measures—Evaluation of each item of clinical guidelines as to whether ‘obvious’, ‘useful’ or ‘controversial’. Results—Ninety-four (59%) of GPs responded. There was considerable variation in views on all 26 guideline items in the questionnaire. The average GP thought that 11.5 items were obvious, 8.5 useful and 5.7 controversial, but these views showed no relationship to the GP's age, sex, ethnicity or partnership size. Conclusion—Clinical guidelines are usually written to be of value to a wide number of clinicians, but it appears that GPs at least have more individual needs on issues of clinical management. This may explain the reported limited impact of guidelines on clinical practice.