Across clinical specialties, the use of clinical guidelines is integral to maintaining patient safety, reducing variation in clinical practice and optimising patient care. Identifying specific barriers to the effective use of guidelines within individual healthcare settings allows for the implementation of effective strategies to overcome them, and ultimately improvements in patient care. Here, we report a single-centre survey of paediatric doctors and nurses, which formed part of a quality improvement project within the Acute Paediatrics Department of an NHS district general hospital. The primary aim of the study was to explore the perspective and resource barriers paediatrics healthcare staff experience when using local and national clinical guidelines. The secondary aim of the study was to examine the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on local and national clinical guideline use. We found that local and national guidelines are frequently used by paediatric doctors and nurses, and that they have positive perceptions of guidelines, overall. However, the NHS Trust's Intranet system was identified as a direct barrier to the use of local paediatric clinical guidelines. Staff throughout the UK in the NHS rely on their Intranet system in order to access local guidelines. Our results provide an impetus for interventions within this NHS Trust, and in the many other NHS Trusts with similar Intranet systems, to increase clinical guideline use and, ultimately, improve patient care.
Hospital intranet system is major barrier to paediatric clinical guideline use a cross-sectional single-centre survey of NHS doctors and nurses