Osteoporosis exerts a significant burden on both individuals and the community and is frequently under diagnosed and under treated in Australia .
To address this issue, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) has launched a new osteoporosis guideline to provide clear, evidence based recommendations to assist GPs in managing patients with osteoporosis.
The Clinical guideline for the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis in postmenopausal women and older men guideline completes a set of four new musculoskeletal guidelines for GPs on osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and juvenile idiopathic arthritis. All guidelines are available on the RACGP website here. The osteoporosis guideline is available here.
The new osteoporosis guideline outlines a best practice approach for GPs in Australia in:
- identifying, diagnosing, treating and managing, in a timely and accurate manner, men and women who have been diagnosed with at least one minimal trauma fracture
- reducing the progression of such individuals to a second fracture
- optimising patient and carer access to information, understanding of the condition and involvement in its management in order to help patients improve their health status.
RACGP President, Dr Chris Mitchell, said that a lack of evidence-based clinical musculoskeletal guidelines has prompted the RACGP to develop guidelines for GPs and other primary health care professionals covering musculoskeletal prevention and early treatment.
"These osteoporosis guidelines are a great addition to the other musculoskeletal guidelines. All guidelines are significant because most current clinical guidelines available are consensus-based, agreed on by peers, rather than evidence-based," Dr Mitchell said.
Each guideline includes:
- Algorithms (diagnosis and management) that are designed to be reference tools during consultations
- Recommendations that provide a summary and grading of the available evidence
The RACGP has been working with expert working groups (general practitioner and other primary health care professionals) and a consultant appointed by the National Health Medical Research Council (NHMRC) to develop all four musculoskeletal guidelines.
These guidelines are one of the first to use the NHMRC Evidence based Matrix (NHMRC additional levels of evidence and gradings of recommendations for developers of guidelines), which greatly assisted the grading of the recommendations.
This project has been funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing and the guidelines have been developed to the requirements of the NHMRC.
Copies of the RACGP musculoskeletal guidelines, the supporting evidence based literature review and full recommendations are available on the RACGP website here.
Source
Royal Australian College of General Practitioners