OBJECTIVES To determine general practitioners' responses to and explanations for variation in rates of referral to hospital and how feedback of data on rates of referral could be used to facilitate practices in auditing their own referral behaviour. DESIGN Visits by audit facilitators to general practices after feedback of details of rates of referral to hospital derived from annual reports i...

BACKGROUND Few studies report on the effect of organizational factors facilitating transfer between primary and tertiary care hospitals either within an integrated health care system or outside it. In this paper, we report on the relationship between degree of clinical integration of cardiology services and transfer rates of acute coronary syndrome (ACS) patients from primary to tertiary hospit...

BACKGROUND Electronic referral (eReferral) from community into public secondary healthcare services was introduced to 30 referring general medical practices and 28 hospital based services in late 2007. OBJECTIVES To measure the extent of uptake of eReferral and its association with changes in referral processing. METHODS Analysis of transactional data from the eReferral message service and ...

Direct access referral for radiological investigations from General Practice (GP) provides an indispensable diagnostic tool and avoids the inherently long waiting time that referral through a hospital based specialty would entail. Improving access to hospital based radiology services is one of Health Information and Quality Authority's key recommendations in its report on patient referrals from...

Background: Inpatient therapy in dermatology offers a number of advantages in several ways i.e. careful monitoring of patients’ conditions, improvement of their skin lesions under the supervision of trained staff, absence of domestic pressure and increasing the quality of patients’ life index. The objective of this study was to describe the patterns of admission for patients with dermatological...

BACKGROUND Methods are needed to ensure that those patients referred from primary to secondary care are those most likely to benefit. In-house referral is the referral of a patient by a general practitioner to another general practitioner within the same practice for a second opinion on the need for secondary care referral. OBJECTIVE To describe whether in-house referral is practical and acce...

Rates of hospital-acquired infections, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), are increasingly used as quality indicators for hospital hygiene. Alternatively, these rates may vary between hospitals, because hospitals differ in admission and referral of potentially colonized patients. We assessed if different referral patterns between hospitals in health care networks can in...

background: acute poisoning has been reported to be the most common reason for hospitalization in iran. this study was designed to delineate the toxic agents responsible for acute poisonings in iran by reviewing poisoning cases treated at four major referral hospitals for treatment of poisoning across the country. methods: this was a descriptive retrospective study on poisoned patients treated ...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the veterinary referral process and factors that contribute to positive outcomes. OBJECTIVE To investigate equine referring veterinarians' (rDVMs') satisfaction with their most recent referral experience and compare rDVM and specialist perspectives. SAMPLE 187 rDVMs and 92 specialists (referral care providers). METHODS Cross-sectional observational study. ...