Vaginal discharge in the adult: a practice guideline.

A practice guideline as a preformatted chart is presented. It is designed to be simple in concept and design, easy to use, parsimonious of data, easily scanned for quality assurance, and to provide clinical and cost-effectiveness prompts. It has supporting medical information for all recommendations that is literature- and experience-based. A patient aftercare instruction sheet is appended. An abbreviated "pocket practice guideline" is also provided. This format is clearly appropriate only for simple, not complex, clinical encounters.