Background In an era when an increasing amount of clinical information is available to health care professionals, the effective implementation of clinical practice guidelines requires the development of strategies to facilitate the use of these guidelines.

Objectives Explore the knowledge and attitudes of Specialised Care Physicians (SC) in terms of the use of CPGs; identify the barriers and facilitators to their proper dissemination and implementation; identify the strategies and actions for improvement that contribute to minimising the impact of the barriers that have been detected.

Methods We conducted a survey in order to assess resources, knowledge and attitudinal barriers of physicians working in Specialised Care towards the Clinical Practice Guidelines.

Results The questionnaire was completed by 209 SC physicians. The application of the recommendations in the CPGs is considered to be easy by 61.2% of participants, while 28.2% considered this procedure to be difficult. Among the reasons behind the difficulty were: the complicated nature of practical application, the lack of organisational, financial and infrastructure-related resources, the variable nature of the patients, the lack of time, little evidence with low-quality recommendations, disagreement, a lack of interest and motivation and the lack of knowledge of the CPGs due to unsatisfactory dissemination.

Conclusion Informed by the results of the survey, leading health authorities are making an effort to develop specially designed interventions to implement clinical practice guidelines, including an easily accessible online database.