Availability, timeliness, documentation and quality of consultations among hospital departments: a prospective, comparative study

Background: Many in-patients require care from practitioners in various disciplines. Consultations most probably have significant implications for hospitalization outcomes.

Purpose: To determine key aspects of consultations provided by various departments to formulate an optimal policy.

Methods: This study comprised two methods: first, a questionnaire was completed in 2019 by 127 physicians interns, residents and senior doctors) from the medical and surgical departments (64 from the surgical wards, 43 from the medical wards and 22 from the emergency room and General ICU) regarding the availability, timeliness and documentation rate of the consultations they received from different disciplines. The investigators rounded through the various departments that were included in the study and they accosted a sample of interns, residents and attending physicians, who were then asked to fill the questionnaire. Overall compliance of filling the questionnaire was 95%. Residents accounted for 72% of the filled questionnaires, seniors and interns accounted for 15 and 13% respectively. Second, a convenience sample of 300 electronic records of hospitalized patients (135 from the surgical wards, 129 from the Medical wards and 36 from the emergency room and General ICU) of actually carried out consultations was reviewed for validated indicators of quality for both the consultation request and response. We used a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from poor (1) to superb (5), to grade the measured parameters.

Results: The availability, timeliness and documentation rate for medical consultations were 4 ± 0.9, 4.1 ± 0.9 and 4.3 ± 0.9 respectively, as compared with surgical consultations 3.2 ± 1.1, 3.4 ± 1.2 and 3.6 ± 1.2 respectively (P < 0.001). The mean time (in hours) from the consultation request till documentation (of the requested consultation) by consultants in the medical and surgical departments was 3.9 ± 5.9 and 10.0 ± 15.6, respectively (P < 0.001). The quality of requests of consultations from the medical and surgical departments was 3.4 ± 1.1 and 2.8 ± 1.2, respectively (P < 0.001). Two different models of consultations are employed: while each medical department adopts several departments for medical consultations, each day's on-call surgeon provides all the hospital's surgical consultations.

Conclusion: We detected significant differences in key aspects of consultations provided by the departments. The medical model of consultations, in which each medical department adopts several other wards to which it provides consulting services upon request, should probably be adopted as a major policy decision by hospitals directors to enhance inter-departmental consultations.