Discharge report accuracy.

The clinical report is one of the most useful ways of cooperation between the hospital doctors and general practitioners. This paper is aimed at checking the accuracy of clinical reports in an Italian children's hospital. The authors examined 200 clinical reports after establishing some criteria to be fulfilled in order to write a good clinical report. Only 18 reports were considered good; the results were discussed with the physicians who had written the reports. At a second evaluation, the authors checked the efficacy of the proposed changes: 97 clinical reports were considered good.