Tag Archives: patients

Introduction According to the British Heart Foundation (BHF), in the UK there are more than 100,000 hospital admissions each year due to ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), equating to 280 admissions each day, or one every five minutes.1 The Essex cardiothoracic centre (CTC) is a tertiary, state-of-the-art centre that is equipped to deal with these high-risk cases. There are five district hospitals covered by the Essex CTC to provide a primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) service. The patient turnover is high and there are emergency and elective procedures undertaken every day. The discharge of patients needs to be timely

Introduction Effective communication is known to improve patient satisfaction,1 and has been correlated with improved health outcomes.2 It is estimated that the medical student learns up to 10,000 new words during the course of their medical degree.3 Doctors frequently employ this new vocabulary in patient consultations, leading to jargon that is potentially misunderstood,4 thus, impairing effective communication. A heavy emphasis is now placed on communication skills at medical school to reduce usage of this type of jargon and use more simplified terms. Patient understanding of commonly used cardiology terminology and doctors’ estimation