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Sharing medical records: comparison of general psychiatric patients with somatisation disorder patients

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Nick Goddard
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychiatry, London SE5 8AZ
Morris Bernadt*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological Medicine, King's College School of Medicine and Dentistry, 103 Denmark Hill, London SE5 9RS
Simon Wessely
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological Medicine, King's College School of Medicine and Dentistry, 103 Denmark Hill, London SE5 9RS
*
Correspondence
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Abstract

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The responses of somatisation disorder (SD) patients to reading their main clinical summary were compared with those of general psychiatric patients, to assess whether the sharing of information and psychiatic opinion might help in the management of SD. Overall the SD patients responded favourably on 8 out of 11 measures; 28 of the 30 (93%) thought it was a good idea to have read the summary and 26 (87%) thought it had provided helpful information. Significantly more of the SD patients (57% compared with 27% of the general psychiatric patients) had their concerns about undiagnosed illness increase as a result of reading their clinical summary.

Type
Original Papers
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 © 1997 The Royal College of Psychiatrists

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