• diagnosis

Dear Editor,

We were interested to read the letter by Kakleas and colleagues.1 They report three findings.

The first is that of 89 children referred to an allergy clinic, diagnoses made in the Emergency Department (ED) clinical notes matched the Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) diagnosis in 60% of cases (43 children with ‘other allergic reaction’ and 10 children with ‘anaphylaxis’). The second is that in the ED clinical notes, clinicians made two allergy diagnoses that are not available in ECDS (cow’s milk protein allergy and non-IgE allergy, occurring in 10 and 2 cases respectively).

Their final finding is that diagnoses made in an allergy clinic were, in descending order of frequency: food allergy, urticaria, cow’s milk protein allergy and food/skin allergy. They note that the diagnosis of urticaria made in the allergy clinic is not usually a diagnosis associated with allergy. ‘Urticaria’ is in fact available in ECDS, in the ‘Skin and soft tissues’ subgroup, not the ‘Allergy’ subgroup. This implies that in those cases at least, …