Retrieving physiotherapy patient records in selected health care facilities in South Africa--is record keeping compromised?

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the process and feasibility of retrieving patient records in a variety of physiotherapy care settings in the Gauteng province in the Republic of South Africa.

Thirteen public and private health care facilities providing physiotherapy services were studied. Multiple methods of data collection (facility walk-through observation aided by a researcher designed checklist, in-depth interviews and attempting to retrieve physiotherapy records) were employed to evaluate the process of retrieving physiotherapy patient records, determine physiotherapy record retrieval rates and to determine the factors that were influencing record retrieval.

The process of retrieving physiotherapy records was arduous and multi-faceted, with some health care facilities allowing patients to take their records home. A final retrieval rate of 46% (36.3% - 100%) was obtained. An odds ratio calculation revealed that it was 13.09 (CI: 8.99 - 19.13; p<0.001) times more possible to retrieve records of patients treated in private physiotherapy care settings (87.4% retrieval rate) than in public sector physiotherapy care settings (34.67% retrieval rate).

This study concludes that the process of retrieving physiotherapy records was arduous and lacked uniformity in public sector hospitals. Further a low physiotherapy record retrieval rate was obtained.