Mary Hawking wrote:
> PS has any work been done from the other end? What do
> recipients of referral letters consider to be of most use?
Getting a bit long in the tooth, now, but have you looked at the SIGN
guideline (number 31)?
http://www.ceppc.org/guidelines/pdfs/31.PDF
Bear in mind when looking at referral letters without comparing them
with the original records (whether on paper or electronic media) doesn't
give you access to all the information that hasn't gone into the
letters.
I have several years' worth of referral letters in electronic form, but
they're all so full of patient identifiers it would be an enormous job
to anonymise them. It's not just a matter of sorting the standard name,
address and date of birth fields, there are headers and footers too.
There's also the need to scan the text for passages like "Thank you for
seeing Mrs Jones, whose sisters Dorothy and Elizabeth have been under
your care for breast cancer and who has recently noticed...". This would
get full marks for good clinical communication but Null Points for
confidentiality.
--
Michael
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