Abstract
© AHHA 2016.Background There are currently limited avenues for routine feedback from hospitals to pre-hospital clinicians aimed at improvements in clinical practice. Objective The aim of this study was to pilot a method for selectively identifying cases where there was a clinically significant difference between the pre-hospital and in-hospital diagnoses that could have led to a difference in pre-hospital patient care. Methods This was a single-centre retrospective study involving cases randomly selected through informatics extraction of final diagnoses at hospital discharge. Additional data on demographics, triage and diagnoses were extracted by explicit chart review. Blinded groups of pre-hospital and in-hospital clinicians assessed data to detect clinically significant differences between pre-hospital and in-hospital diagnoses. Results Most (96.9%) patients were of Australasian Triage Scale category 1-3 and in-hospital mortality rate was 32.9%. Of 353 cases, 32 (9.1%; 95% CI: 6.1-12.1) were determined by both groups of clinical assessors to have a clinically significant difference between the pre-hospital and final in-hospital diagnoses, with moderate inter-rater reliability (kappa score 0.6, 95% CI: 0.5-0.7). Conclusion A modest proportion of cases demonstrated discordance between the pre-hospital and in-hospital diagnoses. Selective case identification and feedback to pre-hospital services using a combination of informatics extraction and clinician consensus approach can be used to promote ongoing improvements to pre-hospital patient care. What is known about the topic? Highly trained pre-hospital clinicians perform patient assessments and early interventions while transporting patients to healthcare facilities for ongoing management. Feedback is necessary to allow for continual improvements; however, the provision of formal selective feedback regarding diagnostic accuracy from hospitals to pre-hospital clinicians is currently not routine. What does this paper add? For a significant proportion of patients, t
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 306-310 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Australian Health Review |
Volume | 40 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2016 |