The patient's family history remains a critical element in risk assessment for many conditions, but substantive barriers impede application in primary care practice, and evidence for its contribution to improved health outcomes is limited in this setting. Short of radical changes in reimbursement, new tools will be required to aid primary care physicians in the efficient collection and application of patient family history in the era of genetic testing.

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Objective-To determine the attitudes of patients discharged from hospital and their general practitioners to a new information card giving details about admission, diagnosis, and treatment and to assess the completeness of the information on the card.Design-Consecutive patients discharged from the care of three consultant physicians over 16 weeks.Setting-One general medical ward in a large teaching hospital.Patients-A total of 275 consecutive discharges of 258 patients were studied. The mean age of patients was 60 years and mean duration of admission five days.Intervention-At discharge from the ward all study patients received an information card and a copy of the card in the form of an interim discharge letter to be delivered to their general practitioner. Patients and general practitioners were asked to complete a questionnaire giving their views on the legibility, helpfulness, quality, and quantity of the information they received. Copies of all the information cards were scrutinised for completeness.Main Other results-The written information about the patient, the diagnosis, and what the patient had been told was generally well completed, although the date of discharge was omitted from 42 (15%) cards. Details of drugs prescribed at discharge were generally thorough.Conclusions-Giving an ipformation card to all patients at discharge was feasible and favoured by most patients and their general practitioners. Having made minor changes in design, we think that we have produced an information card that is a convenient size and will improve communication between patients, their general practitioners, and hospital doctors. We now issue this card routinely to all patients discharged from our ward and hope that it might be widely adopted. IntroductionPatients who were given written information when discharged from hospital were better informed about their illness and treatment than those who were not given such information in a previous study.' From the constructive comments received during that pilot study we redesigned our four sided patient information booklet as an A4 sized card. We now report our experience with the new design in 275 consecutive patients discharged from hospital and an assessment by both the patients and their general practitioners of this new design.

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