Clinical significance of deaths after discharge from hospital unrecorded in the hospital notes.

Abstract A detailed study of the clinical records of a sample of patients who died after discharge from a group of hospitals, and whose deaths had not been noted in the hospital records, showed that about a quarter of them would have been of interest to the clinician. This suggests that some form of systematic notification of deaths would be of value to the clinician as well as to the hospital administrator and clinical research-worker.