I learned about Bounce-Backs back in my Emergency Medicine days. A bounce-back is a patient who you saw in the ER and discharged but then returned within 48 hours with the same complaint. A lot of time is spent in emergency medicine education talking about how to handle bounce-backs. The basic message is “Beware! You may have missed an important diagnosis the first time!”
Bounce-backs happen in correctional medicine, too. Bounce-backs can happen in jails, where we often deal with patients we do not know well. But bounce-backs also happen in prisons, when patients we do know well have a new complaint. Just like in emergency medicine, a bounce-back in a jail or a prison is a patient who comes to the medical clinic with a new complaint, receives a diagnosis and treatment and then re-kites for the same complaint within a couple of days. Here are a couple of examples.
