Discharge Communication Improvement Project

Aim

To improve the timeliness of discharge communication to General Practitioners and other community health providers.

Benefits

• Provides real time visibility of discharge communication tasks and completion rates as well as feedback supporting workflow to junior medical staff and visibility to supervisors of current performance.
• Provides oversight and governance over the desired outcome by making data visible and accessible to consultants and service directors.

Background

The Children's Health Queensland Patient and Safety Service (PSQS) provides support to line management to embed clinical governance into core business in order to ensure the continuance of high quality, safe and effective child and family centred care.

Evaluation and results

The early results in improvement in completion rates of Electronic Discharge Summaries demonstrate an increase in completion within 2 days of discharge from 29% (2016) to 46% (April 2017) and completion within 7 days from 50% to 68%. Additional data will be included in the presentation in early June.

Lessons learnt

The promotion of best practice and cultural change amongst clinicians through training in discharge communication and planning at orientation makes the provision of timely discharge communication sustainable over the longer term.