Hospital patients need open access echocardiography

BMJ 1995;311:326 (29 July)

Letters

Hospital patients need open access echocardiography

EDITOR,--We agree with C M Francis and colleagues that echocardiographyis useful in patients with heart failure and that an open accessservice may be used successfully by general practitioners.¹Heart failure is also common among patients admitted to hospital,²but we have noted a reluctance to use echocardiography in suchpatients.

To investigate this further we recently conducted a prospectiveaudit of all patients acutely admitted to our district generalhospital with heart failure to assess current strategies inthe investigation and management of this condition. Over sixmonths (March to August 1994) we identified 348 patients (178female and 170 male; mean (SD) age 73.2 (11.2) years) who wereadmitted with heart failure.

Complete data were available for 260 of these patients (75%).Only 60 patients had echocardiography during the admission,a further 20 had had it within the six months before their admission,and nine were to . . . [Full text of this article]

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Relevant Article

Open access echocardiography in management of heart failure in the community: C M Francis, L Caruana, P Kearney, M Love, G R Sutherland, I R Starkey, T R D Shaw, and J J V McMurray
BMJ 1995 310: 634-636. [Abstract] [Full Text]