Introduction: guidelines are important to the effective implementation of modern psychiatry.
Method: review Article, using various sources.
Results: the writer's own experience of drafting guidelines is drawn upon, while pubmed articles have been searched on how to implement guidelines.
Discussion: the utility of guidelines are discussed and the relationship of guidelines to audit is explained.
Conclusion: guidelines need to be effectively researched in order to have credibility; they need to be properly implemented in order to achieve desired improvement in practice and their implementation needs to be audited.