A contact is any interaction, regardless of the situation, between a patient and the healthcare professional, in which the healthcare professional has primary responsibility for diagnosing, evaluating and treating the patient’s condition and informing the patient. These can be visits, appointments or non face-to-face interactions.

Contacts can be visits to the general practitioner or other practices, home visits, admissions (in hospitals, nursing homes or care homes, psychiatric institutions or convalescent homes) or other relevant contacts. This includes past and future contacts.

Purpose

Contacts can be recorded to provide insight on the interactions that have taken place between the patient and healthcare professional and in which context these took place.

Instructions

The home environment is the environment where the patient stays regular. This distinguishes between living in a private home and living in an institution for nursing and care. This distinction is the difference between "independent living with any additional care" and "being taken care of including living". Thus, residential homes are counted as the first and stay in a nursing home to the second.