How do General Practitioners Take Advantage of Guidelines: an Analysis Based on China’s Cardiovascular Disease Report

Abstract

China’s Cardiovascular Disease Report 2017 indicates that the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in China has achieved initial results, but still faces severe challenges such as high morbidity, mortality and medical costs of CVD. Although clinical guidelines or consensuses, can not replace clinical skills, clinical experience, and clinical data, they are summaries of valuable management for specific clinical problems, promoting standardized medical practices. However, in China, guidelines have not gained sufficient attentions from primary care providers (PCPs) and have not been applied satisfactorily in primary care. Moreover, significant differences have been found in the understanding, mastery and application of guidelines between PCPs. In view of this, in order to achieve Healthy China goals, general practitioners are suggested to do the following tasks concerning prevention, management and rehabilitation of CVD with great efforts: improve the professional capabilities by intensified learning and training of CVD guidelines; popularize public education of the essentials of CVD guidelines; value and master the CVD risk assessment in accordance with the CVD guidelines; pay attention to use the knowledge learned from the CVD guidelines in practice (for improving CVD management abilities); develop a high-efficiency and high-quality holistic patient-centered management pattern for CVD; prevent the incidence and progression of CVD effectively by implementing successive interventions. All these contribute to achieving good prevention and control of CVD in China as early as possible.