The inherent perils of (the multitude of) guidelines – a focus group study of stakeholders’ perceptions

Hospital boards have the responsibility to ensure compliance of hospital staff with guidelines and other norms, but they have struggled to do so. The aim of our focus group study is to identify possible solutions that address the whole chain of guideline and norm production, use and enforcement and that could help hospital boards and management cope with norms and guidelines. Therefore, we performed a qualitative study of three focus groups involving a total of 28 participants. In the third focus group, no new themes emerged, indicating that saturation was achieved. Focus group discussions were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. Results were coded, and three themes emerged from the results. This research showed that guideline implementation is not just a hospital problem. All stakeholders should combine their efforts to optimise the chain of guideline production, use and enforcement. This is a short version of our abstract. The datasets are the transcripts of the focusgroups