[Clinical guidelines and health services research]

Doctors are bound to ensure and improve the quality of their own work. This is a significant part of medical professionalism and lasts one's entire working life. In this regard clinical guidelines provide valuable and helpful information because they give recommendations on prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and aftercare based on current evidence. However, in their medical work potential users widely ignore such guidelines. Hence it is necessary to discover barriers to compliance with the guidelines and, based on the findings, to investigate more effective strategies for implementing the guidelines. Analyses and evaluation can be performed by using health services research. Undesirable developments in doctors' daily routines, associated with negative consequences for healthy and ill people, as well as for the economics of health care, can be detected and improvements can be identified systematically. This branch of research has become ever more important - even necessary. It ist likely that the increasing demand for assessing the needs, costs, structural conditions, and quality of health care will confirm the significance of such evaluation.