Improving Patient Outcomes

Clinical guidelines are critical to the delivery of the highest standards of patient care. Milan Milojevic, Chair of the Committee for Clinical Practice Guidelines, discusses the committee’s collaborative approach to developing trustworthy evidence-based guidelines that improve patient outcomes.

Diverse knowledge and expertise

It’s a great honour to be Chair of the committee. Our members are a diverse group of experts from different fields. Each member brings not only their specific clinical skills and knowledge but also an alternative viewpoint. This means we are able to critically appraise and interpret the available evidence in an unbiased and independent way before giving an opinion and recommendations to the different healthcare professionals involved in the care of cardiothoracic and vascular patients.

Independence is crucial to the development of trustworthy clinical guidelines. We have a strict conflict of interest policy in place, so committee members with both a potentially perceived and actual conflict of interest that may influence the decisionmaking are automatically excluded from the process. In addition, we work with the Institute of Clinical Trials of Methodology at University College London (UCL) to obtain independent advice and assistance on specific recommendations.

Working in collaboration

Collaboration is an integral part of the committee’s work, and we work closely with many different associations and organisations to jointly develop guidelines for clinicians to follow. We recognise the importance and value of working with organisations that bring specific expertise, knowledge and diversity. For example, if we are working on guidelines that are focused on a pure surgical topic we will collaborate with a surgical association and/ or association of anaesthesiologists and clinical perfusionists. Our focus is always to produce recommendations that will deliver the best patient care and collaboration helps us in sharing knowledge to achieve this common goal.

We currently have nine expert documents under development in collaboration with a number of different organisations globally. This includes the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS), the European Society of Thoracic Surgeons (ESTS), American Association of Thoracic Surgeons (AATS), the European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC), the European Association of Preventive Cardiology (EAPC), European Board of Cardiovascular Perfusion (EBCP) and the European Respiratory Society (ERS). In addition to the guidelines under development we have a further 12 expert documents in the preparation phase.

Get involved

EACTS members are encouraged to get involved in the committee’s work. This includes nominating a project for the committee’s consideration and working with the committee to author guideline documents.

We also invite feedback and comments on the clinical guidance published by the committee. This can be submitted in writing to the European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EJCTS) Letters to the Editor at EJCTS.EditorialOffice@oup.com

EACTS guidelines are well known across the cardiothoracic community. The committee understands the importance of its role in working with other associations and organisations to develop trustworthy guidelines that have a positive impact on patient care.