In the process of guideline development and construction of clinical questions, it is necessary to guide clinicians to propose clinical problems into PICO (population, intervention, control, outcome) structured clinical questions. However, there are still unclear criteria to define and judge the appropriateness of the width of the PICO elements of a clinical question. Either too wide or too narrow can make the PICO question unsuitable to be a question for clinical practice guidelines to answer. We graded the clinical questions to be eight grades (3, 2, 1, 0, −1, −2, −3, mixed) according to the number of the PIC elements, which obviously needed to be adjusted to evaluate applicability of the appropriateness of the width of the clinical questions. Our work can provide methodological references for clinicians and guideline developers.
Objective The modification of Chinese patent medicines (CPM) instructions is currently the focus of national drug regulation, with policies and regulations being established. Nevertheless, the policies pertaining to CPM instructions have not been thoroughly investigated. This study analyzes the direction and current issues with existing policy items to give a reference for future optimization and adjustment of policies linked to CPM instructions. Methods The official website of the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) and National Health Commission (NHC) were searched to collect policy documents related to the CPM instructions issued at the national level in China from January 1st 2000 to June 1st 2024. Based on the classification of policy tools (supply-based policy tools, demand-based policy tools, environment-based policy tools) and the dimension of policy development (policy planning, policy implementation, policy supervision, and policy evaluation ), a two-dimensional analytical framework of "policy tools and policy process" was constructed by using the content analysis method and the quantitative analysis method, and policy documents were analyzed. Results The 27 policy texts included in the analysis generated 104 policy entries in total, wherein, environment-based policy tools (74.04%) were used the most in the dimension of policy tools, followed by demand-based policy tools (24.04%) and supply-based policy tools (1.92%). In the dimension of policy development, policy planning tools, policy implementation tools, policy supervision tools, and policy evaluation tools accounted for 24.04%, 52.88%, 17.31%, and 5.77%, respectively. An in-depth analysis of the content of the policy entries discovered that the existing policy took into account the specification of the content of the instruction and the standardization of the expression of writing, the instruction application guidance, etc, and more and more attention was being paid to the content of the characteristics of TCM in the instruction. Conclusion Currently, there is an insufficient amount of policy documents on CPM standards, which are overly focused on environment-based policy tools and the policy implementation process. To achieve the policy goal of regulating and applying CPM specifications, it is recommended to create a balanced and coordinated structure of policy instruments, emphasise the direct promotion and pulling effect of supply and demand, increase the weight of policy evaluation and supervision, and develop a standard system for evaluating CPM specifications.
When prioritizing clinical questions in the development of the clinical practice guidelines, clinical questions with high recognition and low variability, or high score and less disagreement among experts were often prioritized, while questions with high recognition but high variability were excluded. By this approach, clinical questions with practical value but also showed high variability due to different causes were not accepted as priorities. There were some methodological and clinical limitations by doing so. By summarizing the causes and connotations of expert opinion variability in terms of clinical experience, expertise and values, this paper analyzed the advantages of the variability quantification application, and proposed corresponding methodological recommendations, so as to provide references for guideline developers in the priority selection of clinical questions.