Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs)

Evaluating Organizational Change
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Evaluating Organizational Change
Introduction
Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) are increasingly being used in healthcare practice today. As opined by Steinberg et al., (2011), the CPGs are statements with recommendations aimed at optimizing patient care and are developed from a systematic review of the evidence as well as the evaluation of the positive and negative outcomes associated with alternative care options. Accordingly, medical practitioners use these guidelines to make decisions at the bedside or comply with rules of operation in clinics and hospitals. Moreover, spending by insurers or governments is based on CPGs to realize better results in the provision of healthcare services. This paper evaluates the organizational change in a hospital setting based on the CPG for screening as well as the management of pediatric elevated blood pressure (BP). Therefore, the paper presents an overview of the guideline, a discussion on how the guideline impacts different medical practitioners, how evidence attached to the guideline is defined, a determination of the level of evidence used in the evidence-based practice (EBP) identified, an opinion on how well medical professionals follow the guideline, and a conclusion based on the overview of the guideline as discussed in the current paper.
An overview of the CPG for the Management of Pediatric Hypertension
Pediatric hypertension (HTN) has become a serious concern for the medical field today (Flynn et al., 2017). Correspondingly, research has been conducted in this area, yielding important findings over the last decade. In the foregoing, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sought to address evidence gaps in pediatric HTN based on a systematic literature review of the subject. Consequently, changes have been made on the original recommendations regarding the screening and management of childhood BP as given by the U.S. Fourth Working Group on BP. These changes include 1) Replacing the term “elevated BP” rather than “pre-hypertension” 2) An updated normative data table, 3) A new way of classifying BP, 4) A strong endorsement of ambulatory BP measurement, 5) A reduced BP target for hypertensive children with chronic and non-chronic kidney disease, 6) Replacing the term “Prehypertension” with “elevated BP,” and 7) Simplification of BP classification for adolescents aged ≥13 years based on the BP guidelines by the American Heart Association (AHA) College of Cardiology (Sinha et al ., 2019). Therefore, the updated guideline has improved efforts by relevant medical practitioners to diagnose, evaluate, and manage HTN in children or adolescents within the outpatient setting. Moreover, the updated CPG has been endorsed by the AHA since sufficient evidence has demonstrated its invaluable utility in pediatric HTN care.
It is noteworthy that it was not possible to identify enough evidence in the process of updating the guideline. In such instances, recommendations were made based on agreements through consensus by experts in the subcommittee dealing with the management of pediatric HTN (Flynn et al., 2017). Accordingly, the expe...