Multidisciplinary assessment for the elderly in a day hospital: 1

Abstract

Many scales have been developed to describe the functional status of elderly people before discharge from hospital. This twopart article reports on the outcome of a multidisciplinary assessment and recording method that was developed for elderly people living in the community. In the first part of this article, the literature on elderly assessment scales is reviewed.

Pharmacists' documentation in patients' hospital health records: issues and educational implications

“…Some of the issues (such as perceptions about ownership of records) raised in this study have not been explored elsewhere. However, our results do support the findings of other studies which encountered similar problems in developing multidisciplinary patient record documentation [7–17] . These studies revealed an over‐reliance on oral communication, lack of health‐record ownership and a perceived poor acceptance by doctors of health‐record documentation by other healthcare practitioners.…”

“…A literature review revealed that most studies of multidisciplinary hospital health‐record documentation did not report any input from pharmacists [7–15] . The two exceptions reported that pharmacists were allocated a progress note section in the revised multidisciplinary health record, or were part of a steering group reviewing multidisciplinary hospital health records [16,17] .…”

“…In addition to training, researchers have suggested that the quantity and quality of health‐record documentation are influenced by a number of other factors. These include individual experience, time, accessibility of records, level of perceived ‘ownership’ of health records among various disciplines, and style of health‐records layout [7–17] …”