Guidelines and recommendations from scientific associations within a European context

Abstract

Guidelines and recommendations are increasingly impacting day-to-day clinical care in medicine and dentistry. Although guidelines are only meant to define a range of treatment measures that have been proven to be medically useful, they can have a significant impact on both health care politics and reimbursement strategies as well as be misused to direct particular treatment modalities into the hands of certain specialties. Because these effects tend to not only negatively influence the acceptance but also impair the implementation of guidelines, the process of guideline compilation has to be transparent and based on clearly defined methodology. The German Association of Dental and Craniomandibular Sciences ("Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Zahn-, Mund- und Kieferheilkunde", DGZMK) is the umbrella organization of all scientific dental associations in Germany, and initiating new guideline projects as well as continuously updating existing guidelines is one of one of its major tasks. These activities are pursued in cooperation with the "Zahnarztliche Zentralstelle Qualitatssicherung" (ZZQ) and the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft wissenschaftlich medizinischer Fachgesellschaften" (AWMF).