There are over 125 million general practice consultations taking place annually in Australia, with 83 percent of the Australian population consulting a GP at least once a year. General practitioners (GPs) provide person centred, continuing and comprehensive medical care to individuals and families within their community.

General practitioners are not limited by age, gender, body system, disease process or service site. The scope of clinical practice is challenging, spanning prevention, health promotion, early intervention for those at risk, and the management of acute, chronic and complex conditions within the practice population whether in the home, practice, health service, outreach clinic, hospital or community. General practitioners utilise best practice evidence in the light of individual patient circumstances, to understanding, plan and manage their patients’ health needs.

There are many guidelines providing best practice and evidence for managing different conditions for GPs. The aim of this grant is to support guidelines research that investigates use and implementation of guidelines in general practice. Specifically, research topics focusing on:
1. Guideline: content and format – presentation, useability, navigation, access and functionality of guidelines. How do GPs want information presented and implemented?
2. Behavioural aspects of guideline use: how do people use guidelines, how often, what is looked up, when, why and how can this be improved.
3. Consequence (outcome): benefits of using particular guidelines to improve health outcomes.
4. Evidence-practice gaps: do Australian GPs follow specific guidelines well, and if not, why not?

While research falling under any of these areas will be considered, studies focusing on (1) guideline content and format and (2) behavioural aspects of guideline use are encouraged as areas of particular interest. Both pilot studies and proposals for full-scale research studies will be considered.

The organisers of the Family Medicine Forum 2017 are keen to have international research presentations at the  Forum to be held from Nov 8-11, 2017 in Montreal, Quebec It is the  annual scientific meeting of the College of Family Physicians of Canada and is Canada’s largest and most comprehensive primary care conference. The first day is research and teaching specific, and the remaining 3 days has a clinical

They are encouraging primary care researchers outside of Canada for research submissions, the deadline to submit oral presentations and posters is April 8th 2017

To read more information please go to the  website http://fmf.cfpc.ca/, although a detailed program is not available yet.

The top 4 submitted oral presentations (as independently ranked by 3 primary care researchers and clinicians) are chosen for distinguished plenary presentation on Nov 8. An international distinguished plenary presentation would be valuable to most early career investigators and might make it worth the consideration of members of your department submitting to Family Medicine Forum.

Dear all,

Dr Carl Mahfouz will be speaking on ABC Illawarra (97.3) tomorrow (Thursday 9 February) at 8.30am with Nick Rheinberger about his research that has just been published.

http://www.racgp.org.au/afp/2017/januaryfebruary/an-australian-discharge-summary-quality-assessment-tool-a-pilot-study/

MEDIA RELEASE                         8 FEBRUARY 2017

Graduate Medicine identifies areas of improvement for post-hospital patient care

hospital discharge summary the key focus of new research

A study undertaken by researchers from the University of Wollongong (UOW) could vastly improve the health outcomes of patients following their discharge from hospital.

Dr Carl Mahfouz from UOW’s Graduate Medicine (GM), commenced working on an 18-month study into how hospital discharge summaries could be improved to better suit the needs of the GPs and the discharge information they require to optimally address the health care needs of their patients.

“I noticed inconsistencies on the discharge summaries of some of my patients, which prompted me to investigate whether this was a common problem,” he said.

The aim of the study was to establish the essential elements required in a hospital discharge summary to enable successful post-hospital continuity of care.

“Often a discharge summary is the only piece of information I receive when I take over a patient’s care. To be able to provide the patient with the best care it’s of the utmost importance that this document is accurate and reflects the true state of the patient,” Dr Mahfouz said.

The study, which drew from a national sample of General Practitioners (GPs), found that many hospital discharge summaries were missing key information such as diagnostic test results.

“GPs want an accurate, comprehensive discharge summary in a timely fashion that contains only relevant information relating to the most recent admission,” Dr Mahfouz said.

“Discharge summaries should be written by someone who has actually seen the patient, not just a copy and paste of a whole record and irrelevant information.”

The literature has demonstrated that a delay in a GP receiving a timely discharge summary has a strong correlation to a patient having to be readmitted to hospital.

Previous research shows that almost half (49 per cent) of patients discharged from hospital experienced at least one adverse event in their continuing care as a result of incorrect information contained in their hospital discharge summary.

“We hope this study will lead to more changes being made in the format, delivery and content of discharge summaries to be able to provide more comprehensive, timely and accurate care to patients,” Dr Mahfouz said.

Following the release of the research this month, the Pharmacy Department at Wollongong Hospital has incorporated several key changes, including the addition of medication changes and reasons for medication changes to discharge summaries.

The project was funded by the Illawarra Shoalhaven Medicare Local over an 18-month period.

The study was undertaken by Dr Carl Mahfouz, Professor Andrew Bonney, Associate Professor Judy Mullan and Dr Warren Rich.