How to use community HealthPathways: Practical tips to support decision making in the consulting room.

Background: Community HealthPathways are clinical decision support tools, combining evidence-based guidelines with local service and referral information, collaboratively developed and collated by primary care and hospital clinicians. HealthPathways is being implemented throughout Australia, New Zealand and the UK, and often plays a role in supporting local service redesign and integrated care.

Objective: This article summarises the background and benefits of community HealthPathways and provides tips to support decision making in the consulting room.

Hospital doctors' and general practitioners' perspectives of outpatient discharge processes in Australia: an interpretive approach.

Background: Unnecessary delays in patient discharge from hospital outpatient clinics have direct consequences for timely access of new patients and the length of outpatient waiting times. The aim of this study was to gain better understanding of hospital doctors' and general practitioners' perspectives of the barriers and facilitators when discharging from hospital outpatients to general practice.

Methods: An interpretative approach incorporating semi-structured interviews with 15 participants enabled both hospital doctors and general practitioners to give their perspectives on hospital outpatient discharge processes.