Introduction: The medical report is a legal, written document issued by the physician, exposing the clinical history and the diagnostic and therapeutic protocols applied to the patient.
Aim: To evaluate the patient knowledge about the medical report and its usefulness.
Patients and methods: We included consecutive first-visit patients attended in four general neurology offices. The descriptive analysis included: demographic data (age, sex, level of studies), degree of knowledge on the referring doctor (name, specialty, reason for referral), medical history (medical antecedents, treatment, dosage, reasons for its intake, reasons for not providing it) and the medical report (applications, reasons for not providing it and awarded usefulness). These data were compared between different sanitary areas and cultural levels.
Results: We included 378 patients (average age: 49.1 ± 20.6 years-old; 62.2% women; 40.2% with primary studies; 23.3% with secondary studies). 41.5% did not know the name of the referring doctor, 5.5% his specialty and 2.6% the reason for referral. 3.7% did not know their medical antecedents, 20.4% did not provide the treatment (49.3% did not know it was necessary), 4.8% did not know why they took it and 27.6% the dosage. 14.3% did not provide the medical report and 18.0% applied it (61.7% for bureaucratic reasons and 28.0% for information). Only 18.0% knew that the medical report included the medical information of the patient.
Conclusion: The patient does not know the usefulness and importance of the medical report, despite being a legal document exposing the medical information of the patient disease.