Rationale for producing evidence-based guidelines for community-acquired pneumonia in the Gulf Corporation Council

World-wide community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a common respiratory tract infection and is now a growing public health concern in the GCC region. Practice guidelines are derived statements which lead to informed clinical decision making. National and regional guidelines have been developed in North America, South America, South Africa and Western Europe to assist practitioners managing patients with CAP and have demonstrated to improve patients outcome. Four years have elapsed since the publication of the Saudi Arabian CAP guideline and notable changes in the area of CAP demand revision of this earlier document. We expanded previous guidelines to a regional level in a number of ways: by incorporating changes in antimicrobial resistance profiles in the region, by considering the regional availability of antibiotics and diagnostic procedures, by including emerging data on new advancements in diagnosis and treatment of CAP and, finally, by adopting an evidence-based approach in grading relevant data. The current document seeks to target primary care physicians who manage most patients with CAP in the GCC region. All available and relevant peer reviewed studies published until June 2007 were considered in the literature review. Based on the strength of the evidence, we graded our recommendations to high-level (Level I), moderate-level (Level II), and low-level (Level III) evidence.