Awareness of diagnosis and follow up care after discharge from the emergency department

Leamy K, Thompson J, Mitra B. Awareness of diagnosis and follow up care after discharge from the Emergency Department. Australas Emerg Care. Dec, 2019;22(4):221-226.

This article reports the results of a prospective pre-post interventional study undertaken to determine whether providing a simplified information card to patients (in addition to discharge summaries) upon discharge from Australian emergency departments would improve patient awareness of their diagnosis and follow-up requirements. Brief interviews conducted with 112 pre-intervention study participants and 117 who received the short discharge card, indicated statistically significant improvement (73.2% to 89.7%, p<0.001) in patient awareness with the short discharge card.

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