For three years in the ’90s, I chaired the Health Advisory Committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council. Among our responsibilities was overseeing the development of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) for all manner of conditions in line with the council’s standards of evidence.

We also revised a document called ‘Guideline’, for guidelines that set out ways to assemble the available data to produce CPGs.

All the tasks involved in developing CPGs, including multiple rounds of consultations and expert advisory panels, had the potential to swamp our agenda. I learned much about guidelines and the surrounding politics during that time.

Two decades later, in 2010, Australia had nine times as many CPGs, with a total of 300 ‘fair quality’ ones in circulation.¹