The Royal College of Ophthalmologists is dedicated to developing high quality resources to provide guidance and recommendations to maintain standards of patient care and inform the delivery of eye care services. A major part of this program to support clinicians to make better decisions about appropriate healthcare has been to produce clinical guidelines.
To complement the RCOphth guidelines we are publishing a new type of guidance, Concise Practice Points (CPPs), these are much shorter documents focussing on individual elements or a combination of elements of patient care where there is recognized uncertainty and they make recommendations for less frequent and targeted clinical situations.
A CPP clearly and succinctly describes the available scientific and clinical evidence alongside expert input to help reduce uncertainty on the best options to enhance clinician and patient decision making. The first CPP on Intraoperative Antimicrobial Prophylaxis in Elective Cataract Surgery Patients with Penicillin Allergy has been published on the RCOphth website and there are others in production.
The clinical guidelines we produce, are developed to look at common conditions and will contain recommendations across whole episodes of care and are systematically developed using a strict methodological process that has been accredited by NICE. They provide a clear description and appraisal of the scientific evidence and behind clinical recommendations and have an explicit link between the recommendations made and the scientific evidence where high quality scientific and clinical evidence must take precedence over expert judgment. They aim to make recommendations about appropriate health care for specific clinical situations for the majority of clinical situations, thereby reducing unwarranted variations in practice. As with all clinical guidance they are an aid to clinical judgment not a replacement for it.
Please do contact the College at [email protected] to propose new topics, if there are any areas that medical and non-medical professionals feel are subject to a variation in practice or are a cause for uncertainty and could benefit from guidance.