Believe it or not! Same-day discharge summaries for GPs

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KnowCents Technology

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Julie Lambert

A Queensland hospital is aiming to send discharge summaries to GPs on the same day that patients leave the hospital

A Queensland hospital service is aiming high with a “real-time” policy to send discharge summaries to GPs on the same day that patients leave the hospital.

The Sunshine Coast Health and Hospital Service plans to introduce the zero-delay target on October 16 with the objective of ensuring continuity of care as patients move from the acute setting to primary care.

A document circulated by GPs on Twitter, which appears to be part of a poster campaign for the no-delay target, bears the slogan: No summary. No discharge!

The artwork shows a patient telling her GP about medication she received in hospital. His response: “You were in hospital?”

Dr Piotr Swierkowski, executive director of medical services at the service, told The Medical Republic the organisation appreciated the need for speed in handovers.

“The Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Service aims to optimise hand-over of clinical information at the time of patient discharge from hospital,” Dr Swierkowski said.

“It is recognised that timeliness of this information being shared with our colleagues in primary care is very important. For this reason, the health service is making efforts to provide discharge summaries as soon as is practicable.”

GPs said the health authority had worked closely with clinicians to plan the policy.

The Sunshine Coast service has responsibility for public hospitals at Nambour, Gympie, Caloundra and Maleny, as well as the new public-private Sunshine Coast University Hospital, opened earlier this year.

In the rapidly growing region north of Brisbane, 123,300 patients were discharged from hospital in 2015-16, an increase of more than 8600 from the previous year.

Dr Swierkowski, who practised previously as a GP in NSW and Queensland, had a bitter personal experience of a communication breakdown between primary and acute care in 2013.

A child patient died of meningitis after Nambour hospital doctor failed to carry out Dr Swierkowsi’s written request to perform blood tests.

Queensland GP Dr Michael Rice, who practices at Beaudesert, said it was a welcome sign that hospitals in the state were coming to share GPs’ views of the importance of discharge summaries as vital for patient care.

“The discovery that Sunshine Coast HSS is setting out to have 100% of these documents prepared as a clinical handover at the time the patient leaves the hospital is exciting news, he said. “A lot of Queensland GPs will remember the triplicate carbon-copy discharge summary. The GP always used to get the bottom copy.”

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Max Kamien
Max Kamien
7 years ago

In the late 1960s I was a medical registrar to Stephen Whittaker in the South Warwickshire District , UK. He had great influence since he was chairman of the UK Merit Awards Committee. It was the best job I ever had and his hospital practised the best standard of medical and nursing care that I have experienced. Dr Whittaker insisted that his registrars phoned the patient’s General Practitioner on the hour of the patient’s discharge with a follow-up letter posted by the following day. I returned to Perth as a consultant in the ‘Big Learning Hospital’ and insisted on the same courtesy to the referring GP (and safety for the patient). Sadly, within a week of my leaving that hospital the registrars reverted to the mean. In the age of modern communication I get an anonymous fax from ED and a month or two later, a long letter full of acronyms only 80% are able to be correctly translated by Google. Private patient letters are much shorter and quicker. They are are dictated but not signed. GPs letters are rarely much better. GPs say: ‘what is the use of a work of literature if no one reads it. There have been some recent cases in the medical press where patients have died from a lack of communication. So good on the Sunshine Coast HSS for its iteration of what badly needs to be a change in the ‘busy busy’ culture of medicine.

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Annabel
Annabel
7 years ago

I don’t know why this is a story. The hospitals I deal with in Sydney all seem to be able to get discharge summaries done before the patients leave hospital, and a copy addressed to the GP is given to the patient. However, patients may or may not turn up with them. My gripe is that they have an effective electronic communication system which will send that same discharge summary directly to the GPs inbox as the patient is leaving hospital (or next day at the latest), but about half of discharge summaries don’t come that way because no-one has bothered to ask the patient for their GPs name and add it to the patient’s medical record. These are the ones where important clinical issues are potentiallly missed, especially if the patient does not attend to follow up. But it shouldn’t be news that a hospital is aiming to get them all written in time. I would prefer a poster pointing out that the discharge summary is a letter that should be addressed to another doctor, the doctor you are handing over to, not “NO GP” as is often the case

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