New Guidelines

From the National Guidelines Clearinghouse:

The New York State Department of Health has recently released two guidelines:

• HIV in infants and children (February 2005)
• Screening for substance abuse (March 2005)

The National Guidelines Clearinghouse (NGC) is is a comprehensive database of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and related documents. NGC's mission is to provide physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals "an accessible mechanism for obtaining objective, detailed information on clinical practice guidelines and to further their dissemination, implementation and use. "

Key components of NGC include:

• Structured abstracts (summaries) about the guideline and its development
• Links to full-text guidelines, where available, and/or ordering information for print copies
• Palm-based PDA Downloads of the Complete NGC Summary for all guidelines represented in the database
• A Guideline Comparison utility that gives users the ability to generate side-by-side comparisons for any combination of two or more guidelines
• Unique guideline comparisons called Guideline Syntheses prepared by NGC staff, compare guidelines covering similar topics, highlighting areas of similarity and difference. NGC Guideline Syntheses often provide a comparison of guidelines developed in different countries, providing insight into commonalities and differences in international health practices.