Intensive care discharges: improving the quality of clinical handover through changes to discharge documentation.

Patients who have stepped down from intensive care tread a precarious clinical course, and the handover of care between clinical teams at this point should be treated as a high risk event. Poor handover can leave patients vulnerable to suboptimal care and preventable harm. Properly structured written discharge summaries have been shown to improve information transfer and quality of care.

Aspects of mental health dysfunction among survivors of childhood cancer.

Background: Some previous studies have reported that survivors of childhood cancer are at an increased risk of developing long-term mental health morbidity, whilst others have reported that this is not the case. Therefore, we analysed 5-year survivors of childhood cancer using the British Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (BCCSS) to determine the risks of aspects of long-term mental health dysfunction.

Procedure: Within the BCCSS, 10 488 survivors completed a questionnaire that ascertained mental health-related information via 10 questions from the Short Form-36 survey.