What is the quality of clinical practice guidelines accessible on the world wide web for the treatment of musculoskeletal conditions in physiotherapy?

Abstract

Health care professionals have a duty to provide the best services available to their clients. Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) can help physiotherapists do so by providing them with access to clinical recommendations for evaluating and treating various conditions. The purpose of this study was twofold: to assess the quality of existing CPGs in physiotherapy and to create a Web-based inventory of these CPGs. Nine guidelines were selected (consisting of 61 recommendation statements) according to predetermined inclusion/exclusion criteria and then independently quality assessed by four appraisers using the AGREE (Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation) Instrument. The methodological quality of these musculoskeletal CPGs was fair (mean quality score of 46.6%; range 0%–83%; [95% confidence interval {CI} 17.0%–70.5%]) depending on the specific AGREE dimension.