The Advisory Steering Committee has developed the following summary of the guiding mission, vision, and principles of APA’s clinical practice guideline development process.
Mission
- Improve mental, behavioral, and physical health by promoting clinical practices based on the best available evidence.
- Identify interventions that are effective and can be implemented in the community.
- Develop clinical practice guidelines that are scientifically sound, clinically useful, and informative for psychologists, other health care professionals, training programs, policy makers, and the public.
Vision
- Improve mental, behavioral and physical health.
- Improve patient experiences of care.
- Improve the effectiveness, quality, and value of healthcare services.
- Inform shared decision-making between patients and health care professionals.
- Improve practice by health care professionals.
- Enhance training of psychologists and other health care professionals.
- Enhance competency of psychologists and other health care professionals.
- Educate health care professionals, consumers, and policy makers about effective interventions.
- Identify gaps in the evidence base to be addressed by future research.
Operational principles
- Focus on treatment efficacy and clinical utility for specific problems or disorders.
- Utilize transparent rationale and procedures for guidelines development.
- Solicit input from health care professionals, consumers, educators, payers, and policy makers.
- Focus on prevention, treatment, or management.
- Address common factors and therapeutic relationships associated with effective interventions.
- Consider the full range of research evidence.
- Evaluate the quality of the evidence and identify areas where it is lacking.
- Identify potential harms and benefits.
- Consider outcomes across multiple domains.
- Consider setting, sociodemographic, multicultural issues, and patient preferences.
- Acknowledge the clinician’s responsibility for individualized clinical care decisions.
- Provide recommendations that are advisory rather than compulsory.
- Update guidelines periodically to reflect developments in research and practice.
Note: Clinical practice guidelines are focused on specific disorders and interventions, while professional practice guidelines are mainly concerned with how practice is conducted with particular populations or in particular settings.