BMJ 1998;316:642-642 ( 28 February )

Editorials

Communication among health professionals

Human factors engineering can help make sense of the chaosInformation in practice p 673

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Last year, my father was told by his family doctor that the cardiologist had found aortic stenosis during a diagnostic evaluation for hypertension. Some time later it transpired that the specialist's diagnosis had been wrongly transmitted. Instead of a major valve defect, my father actually had atherosclerosis, a much more benign diagnosis. The kind of culture that makes this sort of unfortunate miscommunication possible is examined in a paper in this week's BMJ and a recently published government report. 1 2 Their conclusions will come as no surprise to many BMJ readers---that communication between health professionals is a mess.

Both sets of authors offer a series of insightful recommendations on what might be done to improve things. However, there is also a pressing need to define the role of applied research in this area and to accept that other disciplines have a lot to teach health professionals on how to design, . . . [Full text of this article]
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Relevant Article

Communication among health professionals
Ros Salter, Paul Brettle, F D R Hobbs, M J S Langman, and Helen Crimlisk
BMJ 1998 317: 279. [Extract] [Full Text]

This article has been cited by other articles:

  • Horwitz, L I, Moin, T, Krumholz, H M, Wang, L, Bradley, E H (2009). What are covering doctors told about their patients? Analysis of sign-out among internal medicine house staff. Qual Saf Health Care 18: 248-255 [Abstract] [Full text]  
  • van Walraven, C., Cernat, G., Austin, P. C. (2006). Effect of Provider Continuity on Test Repetition. Clin. Chem. 52: 2219-2228 [Abstract] [Full text]  
  • Callen, J. L., Westbrook, J. I., Braithwaite, J. (2006). The Effect of Physicians' Long-term Use of CPOE on Their Test Management Work Practices. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 13: 643-652 [Abstract] [Full text]  
  • Stiell, A., Forster, A. J., Stiell, I. G., van Walraven, C. (2003). Prevalence of information gaps in the emergency department and the effect on patient outcomes. CMAJ 169: 1023-1028 [Abstract] [Full text]  
  • Savage, J. (2000). Ethnography and health care. BMJ 321: 1400-1402 [Full text]  
  • Salter, R., Brettle, P., Hobbs, F D R, Langman, M J S, Crimlisk, H. (1998). Communication among health professionals. BMJ 317: 279-279 [Full text]  
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