Clinical Practice Guidelines [CPGs] are statements that include recommendations intended to optimise patient care. They are formed on the basis of a review of the best available evidence, along with an assessment of the benefits and harms of alternative care options. For CPGs to be trustworthy, they should be based on a transparent process which minimises conflicts of interest and risk of bias. To this end, CPGs are recommended to be developed by Guideline Development Groups [GDGs] that are multi-disciplinary, diverse and include representatives of stakeholder groups like consumer organisations, patient advocacy groups or even patients themselves.

For the ISSH to form such GDGs, the first steps would be to train candidate members regarding the process of developing CPGs. For this, and for the systematic review of evidence, help of experts like statisticians, epidemiologists and other specialists is necessary. It is important to realise that once these mechanisms are in place, the ISSH is in a unique position to provide guidelines on a wide variety of problems lacking in western literature.

The ISSH Research wing and its members have taken up the responsibility to formulate such guidelines for few of the common hand surgery related conditions in the most scientific way for its members. The plan of formulating such guidelines and the work flow implementation is given in the attached document.