BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL
751
25 SEPTEMBER 1976
CORRESPONDENCE Drought dangers Chronic urticaria Requests for references D H Howe, FRCS ........................ 756 Anne E Solomon, MRCP, and J Macaulay .... 758 T L Schofield, FRCS; D C Bodenham, FRCS; P J E Wilson, FRCS, and J S Waters, FRCS .... 751 Security units for dangerous and Hypoglycaemia in children undergoing operations Travellers' diarrhoea difficult patients J C Simpson, FFARCS .................... 758 J H Baron, FRCP ........................ 752 J H Price, MD .......................... 756 BMA and HCSA Emergency medical care Caecocolic intussusception: an unusual D B Murray, LRCP, and others ............ 758 P d'A Semple, MRCP; J C Murdoch, MRCGP. 752 physical sign J F B Dossetor, MRCP .................... 756 Keeping tabs on trainers Compulsory seat belts J M Kenworthy-Browne, MRCP; R DE F B Singleton, FRcP(c) .................. 753 Fear of ECT Soldenhoff, MB ......... ............... 759 Economy in prescribing L Rose, FRCPSYCH ...... 757 ................ Consultants' contract D Watson, PHD; R Gartside, MPS .......... 753 "Market research" J C Chambers, FFARCS, and others ..... ..... 759 Career preferences Sheila J Handel, MRCGP ....... ........... 757 Plight of the older consultant J D E Knox, FRCGP ...................... 754 S A Jenkins, FRCS ...................... 760 Lymphoma in dermatitis herpetiformis Screening for cervical cancer Bureaucratic cancer J M Fowler, MRCP, and D J B Thomas, R A A R Lawrence, MRCGP ................ 754 S T H Jenkins, FRCP .................... 760 MRCP .................................. 757 Malaria threat to the Seychelles Juniors' contract dispute Misleading chest x-ray film in psoriasis L J Bruce-Chwatt, FRCP .................. 754 M L Jones, MB, and G A Morgan, MB ...... 760 G A R Price, MRCP ...................... 757 Immunological factors in pre-eclampsia Industrial action School pregnancies J S Scott, FRCOG; E N Wardle, MD ........ 755 P J Kilner, MB ........... ............... 760 Reverend D W G Bartlett, MRCS .......... 757 BMA representation in hospitals Cigarette smoking in pregnancy R G Newcombe, MA .................... 755 Home treatment of convulsions E M Rosser, MB ........................ 760 A A Stephen, MB ........................ 757 Royal Medical Benevolent Fund Confirmation of abstinence from smoking Iodine content of food Christmas appeal J A McM Turner, MRCP; M A H Russell, J C Stewart, FRACGP, and G I Vidor, FRAcp. . 757 ....... 755 Sir Thomas Holmes Sellors, FRCS ..... FRCPSYcH, and P V Cole, FFARCS ..... ..... 760
Correspondents are urged to write briefly so that readers may be offered as wide a selection of letters as possible. So many are being received that the omission of some is inevitable. Letters should be signed personally by all their authors. Requests for references SIR,-Far be it for me to rush to the support of hospital administrators, either at district or area level, but the faults aired by Dr T B Boulton (24 July, p 236) and others lie not with the administrators, but with us consultants. We have abdicated our professional responsibilities in too many ways. We have handed over too readily to too willing lay staff those tasks which are essentially ours. Administrators are only too keen to assume duties which should be carried out by consultants and thereby erode our status in hospital administration. In the appointment of a consultant references are usually requested and taken up by the regional medical officer and are only read by him to the selection committee. There is no reason why a similar procedure should not be adopted for junior appointments. A consultant is appointed as chairman of the selection committee and all requests for references should be sent out under his signature and returned to him personally under confidential cover. That Dr Boulton received the letter he described is to be blamed on the consultant(s) with whom the candidate was to work. For, let it be repeated ad nauseam, junior staff work for consultants, who have the ultimate responsibility for their training and their actions. Juniors are not responsible to some faceless "personnel officer" of the district management team or area health authority who is only too eager to pass the buck to the consultant should anything untoward occur. A young relative of mine recently applied for a number of rotating senior house officer
appointments. His application was never even acknowledged by the majority. He received the form reproduced here (necessarily modified) without any covering letter from one hospital. Is this an example of professional manners regarded as acceptable in 1976 ?
Another aspect of the same problem is the "signing-up" of preregistration doctors. It appears common practice that a consultant is handed a form from the administrators which he is expected to sign and return to the "sector administrator," who then countersigns that the preregistration houseman has completed his six months' appointment satisfactorily. I have steadfastly refused to use such forms. It is the responsibility of the consultant alone-and no one else-to certify that a doctor is fit for full registration and has fulfilled the conditions laid down by the GMC.
AS WE ARE NOT ISSUING APPLICATION FORMS FOR THIS POST, I SHOULD BE GRATEFUL IF YOU COULD FORW4ARD YOTR APPLICATION, W4ITH FAMES AND ADDRESSES OF TTO REFEREES, TO ME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
SHO ROTATION
Dr A
^Dr B
Dr I
T" r t?
rs I
andl J
/D
\
9
lr C
3
Rh & Chest.s\
/
TPro f t
Dr G
Dr r
Drs D andE
752
BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL
To quote an outmoded cliche-"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Unless consultants assume responsibilities and the added effort which this entails we shall see more and more examples as quoted by Dr Boulton and others. If medicine is to remain an independent profession we need to set an example to our juniors, who, fortunately, appear to be more aware of the problems which face them than do some of my consultant colleagues. The future of British medicine lies with the younger generation, who are, as Mr J McE Potter (21 August, p 479) says, more intelligent than ever before. They should be accorded the same courtesies as we extend to any colleague. "The fault, dear Dr Boulton, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we have allowed ourselves to become underlings" (with apologies to the Bard).
THEo SCHOFIELD Royal United Hospital, Bath
SIR,-I would like to draw attention to an increasing tendency of the new administrators in many areas to a worsening practice of asking for references at very short notice. Today I received, on the precise day allocated for the interview, a request for a reference sent out by second class mail. The letter was delivered within the time allowed by the GPO, but even if it had been sent by first class mail it would have been unlikely to reach me in time to prepare a reference and make sure it arrived at area headquarters by the date it was requested. By the same post one of my staff, for whom the reference was required, received by second class mail and bearing the same postmark and date on the letter a request to attend for interview 100 miles away, a clearly almost impossible task. This casual attitude to a most important matter is discourteous in the extreme and may well cost an applicant a job. In exceptional circumstances a telephone call would prevent such a situation. It also raises the question of the validity of any decision made by a committee under these circumstances. D C BODENHAM Department of Plastic and Jaw Surgery, Frenchay Hospital, Bristol
SIR,-Recent correspondents have rightly expressed criticism and concern over current administrative practices in the request and return of references for medical appointments (24 July, p 236, 14 August, p 424, 21 August, p 478, and 4 September, p 585). We have lately been sent such a request (for the post of surgical registrar) which seemed to us to set altogether new and unwelcome standards. The document was the familiar cyclostyled letter, emanating from the office of the personnel officer of a neighbouring area health authority and returnable to him. The objectionable nine of its 16 lines of text must be quoted verbatim: "In order to protect the public, the post for which application is being made is exempt from Section 4 (2) of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, 1974, by virtue of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, 1974 (Exceptions) Order, 1975. It is not, therefore, in any way contrary to the Act to reveal any information you may have concerning convictions which would otherwise be considered as 'spent,' in relation to this application
and which you consider relevant to the applicant's
suitability for employment. Any such information will be kept in strict confidence, and used only in consideration of the suitability of this applicant for a position where such an exemption is appropriate. "
The innuendo is not only insulting but gratuitously so. The statutory duty to "protect" the public resides with the General Medical Council, which maintains a register of doctors adjudged fit to practise. It is a simple matter for an employing authority to verify the registration of its potential medical staff. The ethical obligation of individual medical referees is then simply to provide an honest testimonial as to an applicant's professional qualities. We agree with your earlier correspondents that, wherever feasible, references should be submitted direct to the consultants concerned, who should be named in the advertisement; but failing that to a named senior medical administrator, not to anonymous lay intermediaries. Such a procedure would sometimes impose yet a further unpaid administrative burden upon clinicians, but the principle that medical matters should be dealt with by medical men is too important to be surrendered out of either indifference or inertia. P J E WILSON J S WATERS Morriston Hospital, Swansea
25 SEPTEMBER 1976
of controlled trials4 5 but then doubt either their practicality or their safety, joining the other group in merely recommending the traveller to rely on the old adages about care with food and water well summarised by the DHSS,6 although I doubt ifmost laymen would understand that the DHSS's coy sentence, "A high standard of personal hygiene is also of the greatest importance," means "the importance of washing the hands after visiting the WC." Certainly Streptotriad (streptomycin, sulphadimidine, sulphadiazine, and sulphathiazole) might "cause crystal deposition in the kidney." However, Sulphatriad was deliberately formulated with three separately soluble sulphonomides (sulphathiazole, sulphadiazine, and sulphamerazine), and May and Baker "have no records of any patient developing crystalluria while taking Streptotriad." (5) Empiricists not only accept the evidence of controlled trials but actually prescribe chemoprophylactics with apparent success for their staff6-8 or their families.9 Clearly we need more controlled trials of chemoprophylaxis to convince groups 1-4. Perhaps the research committee of the British Society of Gastroenterology would arrange one for the next world congress? Not that we should be insular: the 24th Annual Meeting of the BSGE was smitten with travellers' diarrhoea in spite of the large quantities of alcohol British gastroenterologists reluctantly consume before during and after their annual dinners in order to produce the bactericidal gastric acid you demand.
Travellers' diarrhoea J H BARON SIR,-There seem to be five different current medical attitudes to travellers' diarrhoea. (1) Traditionalists hold that this is basically not an infectious disease and that chemoprophylaxis is therefore not indicated. This view has been restated in the British National Formulary 1976-78: "travellers' diarrhoea is frequently due to non-infective causes" (p 120) and "there is no evidence that antibiotics, sulphonamides or clioquinol are effective in the prophylaxis of travellers' diarrhoea" (p 39). (2) Rationalists such as your contemporary' accept that the recent study2 of participants in the gastroenterology congress at Mexico City confirms the earlier work that travellers' diarrhoea is usually due to enteropathic bacteria, especially Escherichia coli,3 but either deny or ignore the value of chemoprophylaxis. (3) Sceptics, as in your recent leading article (14 August, p 385), accept the evidence for enteropathic bacteria2 3 only reluctantly and then ask for all Koch's postulates, although doubting whether gastroenterologists would volunteer to eat their colleagues' faecal extracts. Fortunately no ethical committee need be asked to approve such a trial since it has occurred involuntarily after the Central Public Health Labroatory isolated E coli 0148K ?H28 from the faeces of 540,, of British troops developing diarrhoea within two weeks of arrival in Aden and never from healthy soldiers or those with shigella or salmonella diarrhoea.3 One of the assistants working on this project developed abdominal pain, profuse watery diarrhoea, malaise, and weakness but no fever. Faeces on the first and second days of his illness grew E coli 0148K ?H28, the diarrhoea stopped within 24 hours of treatment with oral colistin sulphate, and the faeces thereafter failed to grow this
St Charles's Hospital, London W10 1 Lancet, 1976, 2, 30. 2 Merson, M H, et al, New England journal of Medicine, 1976, 294, 1299. 3 Rowe, B, Taylor, J, and Bettelheim, K A, Lancet, 1970, 1, 1. 4 Kean, B H, et al, Journal of the American Medical
Association, 1962, 180, 367. Turner, A C, British Medical Journal, 1967, 4, 653. 6Turner, A C, Practitioner, 1971, 206, 615. Sperry, R N, Bulletin of the British Association of Sports Medicine, 1968, 3, 13. 8Turner, A C, Lancet, 1976, 2, 320. 9 Baron, J H, Lancet, 1976, 2, 143. 5
Emergency medical care
SIR,-Dr Hugh Conway (28 August, p 511) has demonstrated in Paisley that 50-9% of emergency medical ward admissions to his urban district general hospital were referred by general practitioners, while 37-30% were self-referred. Currently in a neighbouring Glasgow teaching hospital, with a large GP health centre adjacent to it, we are studying similarly the mode of referral of such patients. Of the first 200 consecutive medical ward admissions studied, 172 (86%,O) have been emergencies. Of these, 616V° were referred by GPs, 11-6o0 by the doctor deputising service, and 24-4% were self-referrals. The corresponding Paisley figures were 50-9% 6 8%, and 37-3°O. In view of Dr Conway's reference to public concern about the deputising service there may be some reassurance in our finding that in all 20 cases in our preliminary series thus referred there were telephone referral calls and accompanying admission letters compared with 93A4% of the GP referrals. In addition, the preadmission label was broadly in agreement with the discharge diagnosis in all 20 E coli.3 (4) Defeatists such as you accept the evidence cases compared with 92-2% of GP admissions.
751
25 SEPTEMBER 1976
CORRESPONDENCE Drought dangers Chronic urticaria Requests for references D H Howe, FRCS ........................ 756 Anne E Solomon, MRCP, and J Macaulay .... 758 T L Schofield, FRCS; D C Bodenham, FRCS; P J E Wilson, FRCS, and J S Waters, FRCS .... 751 Security units for dangerous and Hypoglycaemia in children undergoing operations Travellers' diarrhoea difficult patients J C Simpson, FFARCS .................... 758 J H Baron, FRCP ........................ 752 J H Price, MD .......................... 756 BMA and HCSA Emergency medical care Caecocolic intussusception: an unusual D B Murray, LRCP, and others ............ 758 P d'A Semple, MRCP; J C Murdoch, MRCGP. 752 physical sign J F B Dossetor, MRCP .................... 756 Keeping tabs on trainers Compulsory seat belts J M Kenworthy-Browne, MRCP; R DE F B Singleton, FRcP(c) .................. 753 Fear of ECT Soldenhoff, MB ......... ............... 759 Economy in prescribing L Rose, FRCPSYCH ...... 757 ................ Consultants' contract D Watson, PHD; R Gartside, MPS .......... 753 "Market research" J C Chambers, FFARCS, and others ..... ..... 759 Career preferences Sheila J Handel, MRCGP ....... ........... 757 Plight of the older consultant J D E Knox, FRCGP ...................... 754 S A Jenkins, FRCS ...................... 760 Lymphoma in dermatitis herpetiformis Screening for cervical cancer Bureaucratic cancer J M Fowler, MRCP, and D J B Thomas, R A A R Lawrence, MRCGP ................ 754 S T H Jenkins, FRCP .................... 760 MRCP .................................. 757 Malaria threat to the Seychelles Juniors' contract dispute Misleading chest x-ray film in psoriasis L J Bruce-Chwatt, FRCP .................. 754 M L Jones, MB, and G A Morgan, MB ...... 760 G A R Price, MRCP ...................... 757 Immunological factors in pre-eclampsia Industrial action School pregnancies J S Scott, FRCOG; E N Wardle, MD ........ 755 P J Kilner, MB ........... ............... 760 Reverend D W G Bartlett, MRCS .......... 757 BMA representation in hospitals Cigarette smoking in pregnancy R G Newcombe, MA .................... 755 Home treatment of convulsions E M Rosser, MB ........................ 760 A A Stephen, MB ........................ 757 Royal Medical Benevolent Fund Confirmation of abstinence from smoking Iodine content of food Christmas appeal J A McM Turner, MRCP; M A H Russell, J C Stewart, FRACGP, and G I Vidor, FRAcp. . 757 ....... 755 Sir Thomas Holmes Sellors, FRCS ..... FRCPSYcH, and P V Cole, FFARCS ..... ..... 760
Correspondents are urged to write briefly so that readers may be offered as wide a selection of letters as possible. So many are being received that the omission of some is inevitable. Letters should be signed personally by all their authors. Requests for references SIR,-Far be it for me to rush to the support of hospital administrators, either at district or area level, but the faults aired by Dr T B Boulton (24 July, p 236) and others lie not with the administrators, but with us consultants. We have abdicated our professional responsibilities in too many ways. We have handed over too readily to too willing lay staff those tasks which are essentially ours. Administrators are only too keen to assume duties which should be carried out by consultants and thereby erode our status in hospital administration. In the appointment of a consultant references are usually requested and taken up by the regional medical officer and are only read by him to the selection committee. There is no reason why a similar procedure should not be adopted for junior appointments. A consultant is appointed as chairman of the selection committee and all requests for references should be sent out under his signature and returned to him personally under confidential cover. That Dr Boulton received the letter he described is to be blamed on the consultant(s) with whom the candidate was to work. For, let it be repeated ad nauseam, junior staff work for consultants, who have the ultimate responsibility for their training and their actions. Juniors are not responsible to some faceless "personnel officer" of the district management team or area health authority who is only too eager to pass the buck to the consultant should anything untoward occur. A young relative of mine recently applied for a number of rotating senior house officer
appointments. His application was never even acknowledged by the majority. He received the form reproduced here (necessarily modified) without any covering letter from one hospital. Is this an example of professional manners regarded as acceptable in 1976 ?
Another aspect of the same problem is the "signing-up" of preregistration doctors. It appears common practice that a consultant is handed a form from the administrators which he is expected to sign and return to the "sector administrator," who then countersigns that the preregistration houseman has completed his six months' appointment satisfactorily. I have steadfastly refused to use such forms. It is the responsibility of the consultant alone-and no one else-to certify that a doctor is fit for full registration and has fulfilled the conditions laid down by the GMC.
AS WE ARE NOT ISSUING APPLICATION FORMS FOR THIS POST, I SHOULD BE GRATEFUL IF YOU COULD FORW4ARD YOTR APPLICATION, W4ITH FAMES AND ADDRESSES OF TTO REFEREES, TO ME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
SHO ROTATION
Dr A
^Dr B
Dr I
T" r t?
rs I
andl J
/D
\
9
lr C
3
Rh & Chest.s\
/
TPro f t
Dr G
Dr r
Drs D andE
752
BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL
To quote an outmoded cliche-"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Unless consultants assume responsibilities and the added effort which this entails we shall see more and more examples as quoted by Dr Boulton and others. If medicine is to remain an independent profession we need to set an example to our juniors, who, fortunately, appear to be more aware of the problems which face them than do some of my consultant colleagues. The future of British medicine lies with the younger generation, who are, as Mr J McE Potter (21 August, p 479) says, more intelligent than ever before. They should be accorded the same courtesies as we extend to any colleague. "The fault, dear Dr Boulton, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we have allowed ourselves to become underlings" (with apologies to the Bard).
THEo SCHOFIELD Royal United Hospital, Bath
SIR,-I would like to draw attention to an increasing tendency of the new administrators in many areas to a worsening practice of asking for references at very short notice. Today I received, on the precise day allocated for the interview, a request for a reference sent out by second class mail. The letter was delivered within the time allowed by the GPO, but even if it had been sent by first class mail it would have been unlikely to reach me in time to prepare a reference and make sure it arrived at area headquarters by the date it was requested. By the same post one of my staff, for whom the reference was required, received by second class mail and bearing the same postmark and date on the letter a request to attend for interview 100 miles away, a clearly almost impossible task. This casual attitude to a most important matter is discourteous in the extreme and may well cost an applicant a job. In exceptional circumstances a telephone call would prevent such a situation. It also raises the question of the validity of any decision made by a committee under these circumstances. D C BODENHAM Department of Plastic and Jaw Surgery, Frenchay Hospital, Bristol
SIR,-Recent correspondents have rightly expressed criticism and concern over current administrative practices in the request and return of references for medical appointments (24 July, p 236, 14 August, p 424, 21 August, p 478, and 4 September, p 585). We have lately been sent such a request (for the post of surgical registrar) which seemed to us to set altogether new and unwelcome standards. The document was the familiar cyclostyled letter, emanating from the office of the personnel officer of a neighbouring area health authority and returnable to him. The objectionable nine of its 16 lines of text must be quoted verbatim: "In order to protect the public, the post for which application is being made is exempt from Section 4 (2) of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, 1974, by virtue of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, 1974 (Exceptions) Order, 1975. It is not, therefore, in any way contrary to the Act to reveal any information you may have concerning convictions which would otherwise be considered as 'spent,' in relation to this application
and which you consider relevant to the applicant's
suitability for employment. Any such information will be kept in strict confidence, and used only in consideration of the suitability of this applicant for a position where such an exemption is appropriate. "
The innuendo is not only insulting but gratuitously so. The statutory duty to "protect" the public resides with the General Medical Council, which maintains a register of doctors adjudged fit to practise. It is a simple matter for an employing authority to verify the registration of its potential medical staff. The ethical obligation of individual medical referees is then simply to provide an honest testimonial as to an applicant's professional qualities. We agree with your earlier correspondents that, wherever feasible, references should be submitted direct to the consultants concerned, who should be named in the advertisement; but failing that to a named senior medical administrator, not to anonymous lay intermediaries. Such a procedure would sometimes impose yet a further unpaid administrative burden upon clinicians, but the principle that medical matters should be dealt with by medical men is too important to be surrendered out of either indifference or inertia. P J E WILSON J S WATERS Morriston Hospital, Swansea
25 SEPTEMBER 1976
of controlled trials4 5 but then doubt either their practicality or their safety, joining the other group in merely recommending the traveller to rely on the old adages about care with food and water well summarised by the DHSS,6 although I doubt ifmost laymen would understand that the DHSS's coy sentence, "A high standard of personal hygiene is also of the greatest importance," means "the importance of washing the hands after visiting the WC." Certainly Streptotriad (streptomycin, sulphadimidine, sulphadiazine, and sulphathiazole) might "cause crystal deposition in the kidney." However, Sulphatriad was deliberately formulated with three separately soluble sulphonomides (sulphathiazole, sulphadiazine, and sulphamerazine), and May and Baker "have no records of any patient developing crystalluria while taking Streptotriad." (5) Empiricists not only accept the evidence of controlled trials but actually prescribe chemoprophylactics with apparent success for their staff6-8 or their families.9 Clearly we need more controlled trials of chemoprophylaxis to convince groups 1-4. Perhaps the research committee of the British Society of Gastroenterology would arrange one for the next world congress? Not that we should be insular: the 24th Annual Meeting of the BSGE was smitten with travellers' diarrhoea in spite of the large quantities of alcohol British gastroenterologists reluctantly consume before during and after their annual dinners in order to produce the bactericidal gastric acid you demand.
Travellers' diarrhoea J H BARON SIR,-There seem to be five different current medical attitudes to travellers' diarrhoea. (1) Traditionalists hold that this is basically not an infectious disease and that chemoprophylaxis is therefore not indicated. This view has been restated in the British National Formulary 1976-78: "travellers' diarrhoea is frequently due to non-infective causes" (p 120) and "there is no evidence that antibiotics, sulphonamides or clioquinol are effective in the prophylaxis of travellers' diarrhoea" (p 39). (2) Rationalists such as your contemporary' accept that the recent study2 of participants in the gastroenterology congress at Mexico City confirms the earlier work that travellers' diarrhoea is usually due to enteropathic bacteria, especially Escherichia coli,3 but either deny or ignore the value of chemoprophylaxis. (3) Sceptics, as in your recent leading article (14 August, p 385), accept the evidence for enteropathic bacteria2 3 only reluctantly and then ask for all Koch's postulates, although doubting whether gastroenterologists would volunteer to eat their colleagues' faecal extracts. Fortunately no ethical committee need be asked to approve such a trial since it has occurred involuntarily after the Central Public Health Labroatory isolated E coli 0148K ?H28 from the faeces of 540,, of British troops developing diarrhoea within two weeks of arrival in Aden and never from healthy soldiers or those with shigella or salmonella diarrhoea.3 One of the assistants working on this project developed abdominal pain, profuse watery diarrhoea, malaise, and weakness but no fever. Faeces on the first and second days of his illness grew E coli 0148K ?H28, the diarrhoea stopped within 24 hours of treatment with oral colistin sulphate, and the faeces thereafter failed to grow this
St Charles's Hospital, London W10 1 Lancet, 1976, 2, 30. 2 Merson, M H, et al, New England journal of Medicine, 1976, 294, 1299. 3 Rowe, B, Taylor, J, and Bettelheim, K A, Lancet, 1970, 1, 1. 4 Kean, B H, et al, Journal of the American Medical
Association, 1962, 180, 367. Turner, A C, British Medical Journal, 1967, 4, 653. 6Turner, A C, Practitioner, 1971, 206, 615. Sperry, R N, Bulletin of the British Association of Sports Medicine, 1968, 3, 13. 8Turner, A C, Lancet, 1976, 2, 320. 9 Baron, J H, Lancet, 1976, 2, 143. 5
Emergency medical care
SIR,-Dr Hugh Conway (28 August, p 511) has demonstrated in Paisley that 50-9% of emergency medical ward admissions to his urban district general hospital were referred by general practitioners, while 37-30% were self-referred. Currently in a neighbouring Glasgow teaching hospital, with a large GP health centre adjacent to it, we are studying similarly the mode of referral of such patients. Of the first 200 consecutive medical ward admissions studied, 172 (86%,O) have been emergencies. Of these, 616V° were referred by GPs, 11-6o0 by the doctor deputising service, and 24-4% were self-referrals. The corresponding Paisley figures were 50-9% 6 8%, and 37-3°O. In view of Dr Conway's reference to public concern about the deputising service there may be some reassurance in our finding that in all 20 cases in our preliminary series thus referred there were telephone referral calls and accompanying admission letters compared with 93A4% of the GP referrals. In addition, the preadmission label was broadly in agreement with the discharge diagnosis in all 20 E coli.3 (4) Defeatists such as you accept the evidence cases compared with 92-2% of GP admissions.
