Adapting clinical guidelines to take account of multimorbidity

Abstract

Most people with a chronic condition have multimorbidity, but clinical guidelines almost entirely focus on single conditions. It will never be possible to have good evidence for every possible combination of conditions, but guidelines could be made more useful for people with multimorbidity if they were delivered in a format that brought together relevant recommendations for different chronic conditions and identified synergies, cautions, and outright contradictions. We highlight the problem that multimorbidity poses to clinicians and patients using guidelines for single conditions and propose ways of making them more useful for people with multimorbidity