Background: The referral letter is an often-overlooked yet essential element that contributes to the quality of patient care when specialist services are accessed. In the field of maternal-fetal medicine, incomplete referral letters that fail to comprehensively identify pregnancy risk factors can have significant implications for pregnancy management and delivery planning. Objectives: To evalua...

BACKGROUND around the world health systems constantly face increasing pressures which arise from many factors, such as an ageing population, patients and providers demands for equipment's and services. In order to respond these challenges and reduction of health system's transactional costs, referral solutions are considered as a key factor. This study was carried out to identify referral solut...

OBJECTIVES To distinguish between variation in referral threshold and variation in accurate selection of patients for referral in fast-track referrals for possible cancer. To examine factors associated with threshold and accuracy and model the effects of changing thresholds. DESIGN Analysis of national data on cancer referrals from general practices in England over a 5-year period. We develop...

OBJECTIVE Cardiac rehabilitation remains grossly under-utilized despite its proven benefits. This study prospectively compared verified cardiac rehabilitation enrollment following automatic vs usual referral, postulating that automatic referral would result in significantly greater enrollment for cardiac rehabilitation. DESIGN Prospective controlled multi-center study. PATIENTS AND METHODS ...

Sediment transport under unsteady flow condition is studied experimentally. In the first step, sediment transport under different steady flow conditions was measured and an empirical equation was derived for its calculation. In the next step, two continuous and three stepwise hydrographs were generated in the flume, and their sediment transport rate was measured. The continuous hydrographs were...

CONTEXT Previous reports have discussed incidental disease found on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans that had been requested for an unrelated clinical concern or symptom, resulting in a selection bias for disease. However, the prevalence of unexpected abnormalities has not been studied in a healthy population. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the prevalence of incidental findings on brain MR...

In 1983-84 general practitioners in the Oxford region kept records of their referrals to outpatient clinics over a period of six months. Five years later in 1988-89 the general practice notes of 182 patients referred for back pain were studied to determine the outcomes of their referral. The actions initiated in the outpatient clinics were compared with the general practitioners' main reason fo...