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Audit of psychiatric discharge summaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Nick Craddock  and
Bridget Craddock
Nick Craddock*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, University of Birmingham, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham B15 2TH
Bridget Craddock
Affiliation:
Worcester Royal Infirmary, Worcester
*
(correspondence)
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Improving discharge procedures is a topical subject and audit of discharge summaries is an important part of this procedure. In many hospitals the summary compiled following a patient's discharge is used for two purposes: a copy is sent to the general practitioner to provide details of the patient's illness and management, and a copy is filed in the hospital notes as a record of the admission. Discharge summaries often fail to meet the needs of either psychiatrist or GP. Using a questionnaire study, we have recently demonstrated that GPs and psychiatrists have different requirements from discharge summaries (Craddock & Craddock, 1989). The present study, which examines the content of a sample of discharge summaries from a large psychiatric hospital, was conducted to identify potentially important items of information which are consistently poorly covered in psychiatric summaries.

Type
Audit in Practice
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 14 , Issue 10 , October 1990 , pp. 618 - 620
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1990

References

Bado, W. & Williams, C. J. (1984) Usefulness of letters from hospitals to general practitioners. British Medical Journal, 288, 1813–1814.Google Scholar
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Williams, P. & Wallace, B. B. (1974) General practitioners and psychiatrists-do they communicate? British Medical Journal, 1, 505–507.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
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