We asked Jane Regan the Consultant Assistant in the Hywel Dda Service to assess a scheme to try and score the quality of clinical information appearing on all urine requests from our largest GP practice in Carmarthenshire for a month before we began narrative reporting and the same month after narrative reporting had been in place for some time. She chose September 2013 a year before narrative reporting first started and September 2017, three years after we started narrative reporting. Words or phrases associated with UTI symptoms and signs were scored higher than non-specific items.
Every urine request card for the two Septembers from the practice were reviewed and a total score calculated. As was demonstrated by the investigation of the number of samples received, the total number of urines submitted in 2017 was less than that for 2013. To allow for comparison between the years with a different sample number, the number of samples scoring from 0 to 14 for the two years was calculated as a percentage of the total number of samples.
The plot above seems to suggest samples for 2017 had a higher score for relevant clinical information compared to 2013. This was however a labour intensive exercise and to achieve larger numbers, we will seek to investigate possible IT solutions to gather clinical information available within samples that are requested via the electronic test requesting system.