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The impact of a hospital audit on psychiatrists' letters to general practitioners

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Premal J. Shah  and
Ian Pullen
Premal J. Shah*
Affiliation:
Royal Edinburgh Hospital, 151 Morningside Place, Edinburgh, EH 10 5HF
Ian Pullen
Affiliation:
Dingleton Hospital, Melrose, Roxburghshire TD6 9HN
*
∗Correspondence
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Abstract

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The quality of written communication between psychiatrists and general practitioners has become increasingly important, with the introduction of the Access to Health Records Act as well as with demands placed by the purchasers of psychiatric services. We investigated if a hospital-based audit could be used to monitor the quality of written communications with general practitioners, and if ‘closing the audit loop’ could improve the standards. We found that audit may have helped improve standards, particularly in making letters less potentially offensive and easier to read by non-psychiatrists. A method of measuring the quality of letters is described.

Type
Audit
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 19 , Issue 9 , September 1995 , pp. 544 - 547
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, 1995

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