The period of 28 days is to some extent arbitrary, but it has been widely adopted as maximising the trade off between including as many related readmissions as possible and excludingas many unrelated readmissions as possible.Over the past five years (1999-2003), there is no statistically significant difference* in the overall readmission rate, in Scotland, which is around 10% for medical specialties (e.g. cardiology, respiratory medicine...