[Patient involvement in clinical guideline development: are patient organisations prepared for this task?].

The involvement of patients in the development of clinical guidelines essentially aims at ensuring and improving the quality of patient-centred care. Hence, it becomes an important tool for quality management in medicine since patients are learning the hard way where clinical care is lacking. This may include the inappropriate consideration of current medical knowledge, the unintelligible or insufficient information and education of the patient or information gaps at the interface between care settings.