[The methodological quality of rehabilitation guidelines].

Introduction: The concepts of clinical guidelines contribute to the decision-making and improvement in the quality of medical supply. This paper provides a literature research on rehabilitation guidelines and their evaluation by the "German Instrument for Methodological Guideline Appraisal (DELBI)".

Methods: The clinical guideline research was conducted with the help of an online database as well as expert surveys conducted between August and October 2007. The literature research was updated in October 2008. Only those guidelines that satisfied specific criteria were included in the evaluation.

Results: Although the research yielded 124 guidelines, only 28 were included in the evaluation after applying the criteria. In total, the evaluation was heterogeneous. With regard to each domain, the mean degree of fulfillment reached between 2.1% and 58.3%.

Discussion: Due to an extensive and detailed literature research and expert survey, all relevant clinical guidelines for rehabilitation, which are valid in Germany, could be gathered. A first examination of the guidelines seems to reveal several deficiencies. Possible reasons are discussed.

Conclusion: This paper reveals a detailed survey of the clinical guidelines for rehabilitation. Compared to acute-care medicine, the number of available guidelines is distinctly smaller. With regard to the DELBI criteria, an enormous development in the quality of guidelines for rehabilitation is still necessary. Some of these might be due to inaccurate documentation, which will have to be considered in a further update.