St George’s Healthcare is starting a new discharge summary pilot with local GPs, using the functionality within the trust’s new clinical information systems that were installed earlier in the year.
The 2010-2011 CQUIN agreement with local commissioners requires St George’s Healthcare to dispatch all inpatient discharge summaries within 24-hours of a patient leaving hospital and comply with strict quality criteria.
The trust is currently using a number of software applications to create most of its discharge summaries which presents challenges when standardising the outputs to meet the CQUIN requirements and auditing their quality.
The aim of the new project is to improve the creation of the discharge summaries produced, both in terms of quality and quantity, as well as enabling them to be electronically transmitted to relevant GP practices.
“Discharge summaries play an important part in the delivery of high quality patient services, ensuring continuity between secondary care and primary care professionals,” Says Omar Najim, clinical lead for the project. “The pilot will initially focus on a few consultants in plastics, trauma and orthopaedics, chest medicine, thoracic surgery and the clinical decision unit. In the short term, the discharge summary will still be provided on paper but we expect a pilot of electronic transmission to start in early 2011.”
A number of volunteer GPs have already been identified to take part in the pilot. A separate piece of work in early 2011 will also begin to introduce medicines reconciliation, undertaken by pharmacists, to further improve discharge summary quality.
For further information about the pilot, please email:
Samantha Akomeah
Project manager
Samantha.akomeah@stgeorges.nhs.uk
Omar Najim
Clinical lead
omar.najim@stgeorges.nhs.uk
