RAISING THE STANDARD - PRACTICE GUIDELINES AND CONSUMER PARTICIPATION

Clinical practice guidelines are increasingly affecting the quality of health care, and have the potential to affect the availability of hea lth care options for consumers, Deciding what guidelines will cover, h ow they will be developed and what they will say are, therefore, issue s in which consumers have a considerable stake, While there is a growi ng acknowledgement of the need to involve consumers in guideline devel opment, the reality can fall, far short of the rhetoric. This article advocates the use of three types of strategies in combination to enabl e better consideration of consumers' views in the guideline developmen t process: the involvement of accountable consumer representatives in group decision making, community consultation and the use of research literature describing people's experiences, A framework for assessing the level of consumer participation in an activity is suggested. It is argued that if consumer involvement is to successfully raise the stan dard of health care guidelines, then the standard of consumer particip ation itself needs to be raised. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science L td.