The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has released the National Guidelines for Presentation of Electronic Discharge Summaries (the Guidelines).
The Guidelines recognise critical patient safety risks at hospital discharge and have been revised from the previous 2017 edition to include updated recommendations.
The key changes are:
- Re-ordering of EDS components – ‘Recommendations’ for follow up by primary care provider now moved towards the top of the EDS
- Incorporating Principles for safe, high-quality transitions of care
- Greater alignment with national digital health initiatives
- National Healthcare Identifiers, SNOMED CT-AU (including AMT), Australian Core Data for Interoperability
- Additional guidance for health services and clinicians to distinguish between responsibilities
- Clarification of components that were reported as ambiguous (e.g. alerts)
The Commission says the Guidelines aim to ensure a nationally consistent approach to achieving accurate, concise, and well-designed electronic discharge summaries (EDS).
They provide evidence-based recommendations on the structure, format, and content of EDS, which must be supported by robust clinical governance, training, and evaluation processes.
The development of the Guidelines was informed by extensive stakeholder consultation across acute care and primary care settings.
The Commission last month published a national framework to support health services in reducing the vast number of medication-related errors and hospital readmission rates for patients who are transitioning between care settings.
