New BC Guidelines mobile app

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 59, No. 5, June 2017, Pages 277-278 News


The Guidelines and Protocols Advisory Committee (GPAC) has a new BC Guidelines app for both Apple and Android mobile devices.

GPAC, a joint collaboration between Doctors of BC and the Ministry of Health, is an advisory committee to the Medical Services Commission and made up of family doctors, specialists, and key ministry and Doctors of BC representatives. Its mandate is to provide evidence-based recommendations to BC practitioners to support quality medical care while making optimal use of medical resources. It publishes its recommendations as BC Guidelines—concise, user-friendly clinical practice guidelines with a focus on key therapeutic and diagnostic issues affecting British Columbians (www.BCGuidelines.ca). There are currently 58 guidelines on a variety of clinical conditions and diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, asthma (in adults and in children), and chronic heart failure, and on special endocrine testing and palliative care.

BC Guidelines are widely used by BC health care practitioners, including physicians, nurse practitioners, and medical students, with the website receiving more than 100 000 visits each year.

GPAC partnered with Dr Matthew Toom, a computer programmer and UBC family medicine resident, to create the new app. It works offline, so practitioners can access the guidelines from anywhere. The app can be used to support clinical teaching with medical students, residents, and international medical graduates. It can be downloaded for free from www.bcguidelinesapp.ca.

. New BC Guidelines mobile app. BCMJ, Vol. 59, No. 5, June, 2017, Page(s) 277-278 - News.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

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For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

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