Clinical practice guidelines: necessary but not sufficient for evidence-based patient education and counseling

While clinical practice guidelines provide direction for the management of specific diseases or particular clinical problems, there are major gaps bet ween guidelines and their implementation. The purpose of this paper is to i llustrate how an existing guideline can be used to develop an evidence-base d patient education program. Congestive heart failure (CHF) represents a ra nge of complex, chronic illnesses which offer little hope of cure yet requi re symptom management by health care providers, patients, and their familie s. Successful self-monitoring, self-care, and decision making are based on acquisition of appropriate knowledge and management skills. We describe a c omprehensive teaching program in which the content was built on the clinica l evidence from the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research recommendati ons for CHF, and the implementation process was built on adult education ev idence, adapted to health issues and patient learning challenges. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.