A Survey of Clinicians’ Preference, Opinion and Satisfaction with Radiological Reports at Kenyatta National Hospital - Abstract
Background: The radiology report is a crucial tool to communicate the radiological examination findings to the referring clinicians. There is no universally agreed structure or style of radiological report, and each radiologist and the referring clinician potentially has their own preferred structure and content of the same. At Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) all reports are written and typed by the radiologist and verbal communication of radiological findings are made to the referring clinicians on critical results. There is no Radiology Information System/ Picture Archiving and Communication (RIS/PACS). The radiologists have to grapple with improving the turnaround time (TAT) and clinician’s satisfaction
with the reports. KNH is a tertiary referral and teaching hospital with referring clinicians ranging from consultants in different specialties, residents, medical officers and interns.
Objective: The main objective of this study was to evaluate the clinicians’ satisfaction, preference and opinion concerning the radiology reports within Kenyatta National Hospital.
Materials and methods: A total of 400 eligible referring clinicians (consultants and registrars) were contacted via text message between the months of June and July, 2018 and
requested to fill a 6-part semi-structured online questionnaire concerning radiology reports. Part A of the questionnaire asked about demographics of the respondents, while parts B, C and D assessed the confidence of the referring clinicians in the reports, content, style, language and delivery of the radiology reports they received, respectively using 5-point Likert scale. The clinicians ranked 4 reports of varying content and style concerning a hypothetical patient in part E of the questionnaire. The clinicians were also requested to give reason(s) for the ranking and give any additional comment they had concerning radiology reports.
Results: A response rate of 28.25 % (113) was reported. 59.29% (67) of the respondents were male and 40.70% (46) female. The response rate for registrars was 82.3% (93) and for consultants 17.7% (20). Median length of general practitioners’ work experience was 3.5 years, because most doctors work first as general practitioners before doing a specialty, while that of a specialist was 8.9 years.
While detailed itemized report written under subheadings for each organ/system is preferred by 79.4% (n=90) of the clinicians. A detailed itemized radiology report is more popular with the clinicians (55.1%, n=62) than a summarized itemized report (24.3%, n=28). 84% of the clinicians (n=95) ranked a format that did not give details of the findings
but only summarized the findings as their least preferred.
Conclusion: Clinicians at our hospital value the radiology report in the management of patients.
However, challenges of not having electronic reporting system, means reports are delivered manually hence delay. There are challenges of relaying critical results to referrers
who may have not left their telephone contact. Also, with manual requisitions there are challenges of delivering the report within the shortest possible time.
Referring clinicians preferred structured reporting as opposed to conventional prose reporting.