[Clinical Practice Guidelines for Management of Schizophrenia: Evaluation Using AGREE II]

Colombia is developing multiple national practice guidelines from a range of diseases. Clinical practice guidelines represent a very useful tool to be able to take decision over a patient care that is widely available for the clinician. In psychiatry there are a good number of international clinical guidelines for the treatment of schizophrenia nevertheless there is no article that evaluate them scientifically

In the settings of developing a Colombian schizophrenia practice guideline, a systematic search was performed in multiple databases and the results were then evaluated by two trained persons. We present the results globally and by domains.

We found 164 matches for possible guidelines. After screening 7 guidelines were evaluated with the AGREE II instrument. Globally and by the different domains, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) was the guideline that got the best score. From the guidelines that were reviewed, 4 were from Europe and only 2 were from Latin America. None of the guidelines used GRADE methodology for the recommendations.

The diversity of the schizophrenia treatment guidelines does not allow an easy adoption of the recommendation by a psychiatrist in Colombia.