Muhammad Abdullah, Zamara Sohail, Saira Yasmeen, Muhammad Daud, Madiha Pervaiz, Maria Naz.
Adequacy of completion of radiology request form in a tertiary care hospital Peshawar.
Gomal J Med Sci Jan ;21(1):46-9.

Background: Radiation is one of big hazards in diagnostic imaging. Every imaging scan needs to be justified. For this reason, complete clinical information should be provided to radiology department in form of request form. The objective of our study was to assess the completion of radiology request form (RRF) referred to Radiology Department. Materials & Methods:  This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted at Radiology department of Rehman Medical Institute (RMI), Peshawar over a period of 6 months (from June 2021 to Dec 2021). We checked a data of 300 radiology request forms based on random consecutive nonprobability sampling. Each category of the blank to be filled was given one score. Several fields in the form were evaluated for completeness, if filled, given 1 mark and if not then given 0 marks. The categories to be analyzed included patient’s name, age, date, contact number, hospital registration number, address, clinical question, examination requested, treating doctor’s name and previous imaging / labs. Data was analyzed using Microsoft Excel and SPSS version 22. Results:  A total of 300 forms were evaluated. Name, age, gender of patient was mentioned in 298 (99%) forms, 56 (18%) forms did not mention contact number of patients, relevant clinical history was missing in 104 (34%) forms, 252 (84%) forms had not mentioned clinical question for the examination and 22 (7.3%) forms did not have examination requested. 156 (52%) did not have doctor’s name, 160 (53%) did not mention relevant labs and 127 (42%) did not provide any info on previous imaging. The most common missing was of clinical question. Conclusion: Based on our results we concluded that there was overall a good score of 98% in filling the radiology request form data in demographics, however unsatisfactory performance of 16% by our referrers was seen in mentioning the clinical question to be answered. Comparison made with similar studies has shown that this problem is worldwide.

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