ABSTRACT
In clinical medicine, 'guideline' is frequently to be found in the company of a cluster of other technical terms seeking to define and to patrol the shifting boundaries between acceptable practice and poor practice. The general purpose of clinical protocols is to direct clinicians along preferred treatment pathways by outlining detailed management plans for discrete clinical conditions judged amenable to step-wise decision-making processes specifiable in flow diagrams, or algorithms. Medical review criteria are designed to allow assessment of health care quality, the appropriateness of clinical decisions, services or outcomes. Standards of health care quality are frequently formulated as the percentage of processes or events which need to be accomplished by a health care provider. Performance measures are 'methods or instruments to measure the extent to which the actions of health care practitioners conform to practice guidelines, policies, medical review criteria, or standards of quality'. Codes of practice refer to sets of recommendations encompassing the safety and efficacy of clinical practices.
