title: Diagnoses in discharge communications: how far are they reliable?
abstract: To discover whether general practitioners are correctly notified of a patient's final diagnosis following hospital discharge, an observational study was undertaken in a district general hospital. The final diagnosis was compared with the diagnosis documented in the discharge summary and the take-home prescription. Two hundred discharges were studied. Only 163 (81%) discharge summaries and 138 (69%) take-home prescriptions had the correct diagnosis; 24 (12%) take-home prescriptions did not have any diagnosis at all. In some cases the diagnosis differed between the discharge summaries and the take-home prescriptions. Only in 122 (61%) cases was the final diagnosis correctly documented in both instances. Communication regarding diagnosis in discharge letters is less than adequate. Every effort should be made to improve this.
authors.affiliation: Department of Geriatric Medicine, Wrexham Maelor Hospital, Clwyd, UK.
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Adhiyaman
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Oke
authors.forename: A D
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: White
authors.forename: I U
authors.initials: IU
authors.lastname: Shah
mesh_terms: D003933:Diagnosis; D006801:Humans; D008485:Medical Audit; D008499:Medical Records; D010351:Patient Discharge / Q000592:standards*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results