Good Medical Practice for Drugs. Definition, Guidelines, References, Field of Action and Applications

¹ Service de Médecine Interne A, Hôpital Lariboisière, 2 rue Ambroise Paré, 75010 Paris, France.

Received: 8 July 2008
Accepted: 30 July 2008

Abstract

Proper use of drugs can be defined as the use of the right product, in a correct dosage, during an adequate length of time, for a given patient and provided he has no serious side effects.
It is virtually impossible, with such a number of drugs, such a number of clinical situations to prescribe adequately without using references or guidelines. References may lead to a unique choice, when the diagnosis is certain and the drug to be given is unique. With a good initial and continuous medical education, doctors can take easily this type of decision. The Summary of Products Characteristics (SPC) helps them; by sticking to this fundamental reference, prescription might be more precise and safe. In a lot of clinical situations the choice between a large numbers of therapeutic strategies necessitates use of a guideline based on scientific knowledge. Finally, a given therapeutic strategy can be as effective as and considerably less expensive than another. In such cases, payers can drive doctors to the prescription of the less expensive strategy.
Some difficulties are common to all references and guidelines: 
1. A lot of clinical situations are not covered by guidelines.
 2. Guidelines should be updated each time there is a modification of knowledge: it is extremely difficult to do.
 3. A great number of guidelines exist, issued by scientific community, health authorities or the payers. Sometime you can find a proposition in a guideline and the reverse in another guideline. It could be confusing.
 4. Guidelines should be evaluated rigorously to know if they fulfil their goals.
 5. Some of those guidelines simply cannot help doctors. They are too complex or do not take into account practical situations.
 We have made an inventory of those various guidelines and their weaknesses and we propose some solutions to increase their utility. We propose an analysis of the situation and some solutions to improve the quality and the relevance of the guidelines: to create groups of coordination to choose the aims and the elaboration methods, to initiate a register of guidelines, to list the rules for any new guideline with quality control, to propose a continue medical education for all the health workers. It is necessary to measure the impact of any new recommendation and to do periodical actualisation. The goal of these recommendations is to improve global quality of health.