Postgraduate Pedagogical Training and Interventions to Promote High-Quality Discharge Summaries

Discharge summary writing is an essential skill that junior physicians must possess to ensure high-quality patient care. In the past decade, numerous clinical audits have found that there are significant deficiencies in the quality, accuracy and timeliness of discharge summaries. Such findings are highly concerning because there are known repercussions of poorly written discharge summaries in continuity of patient care, adherence to clinical treatment and follow-ups, as well as clinical and patient safety outcomes. At our centre, we recently embarked on an educational quality improvement (QI) endeavour to implement multipronged pedagogical, assessment and training strategies and best practices that led to significant and sustained improvement in the quality of discharge summaries written by junior doctors in interval clinical audits. Therefore, in this article, we hope to provide seven practical tips for clinician-educators in other healthcare institutions and areas of the world who may be keen to replicate and develop locally adapted educational and training pedagogies to improve the quality of discharge summaries written by junior doctors and medical trainees. In brief, this requires a dedicated QI team of clinician-educators willing to engage with relevant clinical stakeholders in training/curricular implementation, design locally-adapted, evidence-based discharge summary templates and teaching material, adopt blended educational modalities (didactic front-loading and interactive/constructivist), create a supportive work environment, implement regular workplace-based assessments and continued educational campaign and clinical audits to ensure sustainability of the endeavour.