952 Digitalisation: Does This Improve Doctors' Documentation of Communication with Families? a Quality Improvement Project

Abstract Aim The London hospital where this QIP took place recently transitioned to a digitalised system. While appearing straightforward, this transition is imperfect. This QIP focusses on one patient's satisfaction with the hospital experience. If communication with patients’ families is optimised and documented, the doctors/surgeons benefit from medicolegal protection and patients benefit from an improved hospital experience. The question of whether this communication Is happening, but remains undocumented, or not happening at all remains unanswered. We aimed to assess if digitalisation of medical documents affects the number of documented episodes of communication with patients’ family/friends/carers. Method Patient notes on the two main surgical wards were screened for written evidence of communication with family/friends/carers of patients. Patient: date of admission; sex; age and diagnosis were recorded. Patients were surveyed for insight. A poster was placed in both doctors’ offices. 1st cycle data was presented at the surgical X-ray meeting, the 2nd cycle data was collected and analysed. Results No significant differences in episodes of communication with families/friends/carers were found on either ward (p=0.904 and p=0.24). This was identical in the orthopaedic and general/colorectal patients (p=0.214 and p=0.582). Conclusions Overall, there were no significant changes in documented episodes of communication with families after digitalisation. There are faults with the implementation of the digital system in this hospital. We found several solutions, such as mandatory instructive e-learning for a new system. Further, more specific, data is required to assess if communication is happening but not being documented.