1.
Aust Health Rev
; 29(2): 240-6, 2005 May.
Artigo
em Inglês
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-15865576
RESUMO
Medical practitioners with varying levels of experience may make medical decisions in hospitals. Little is known about who is responsible for these decisions. We determined transfusion appropriateness during an audit of blood transfusion, before developing practice improvement strategies, by concurrent medical record review. The prescriber could be determined in 78% of transfusion episodes: most were specialist staff. Registrars and after-hours staff prescribed significantly fewer inappropriate transfusions. The findings have significant implications in understanding clinical decision making in the hospital setting and for the targeting of quality improvement strategies in particular.