Assessment and care management (ACM) of elderly patients prior to discharge from hospital has been in place since 1993. It involves a complex multi-disciplinary assessment of needs which may delay discharge from hospital. We prospectively studied the process of ACM in a group of patients discharged from hospital over a three month period. The times taken for completion of the necessary reports,...

After hospital discharge, correct understanding and use of medications are key components of patient safety. The current discharge process does not provide adequate fail-safes to ensure quality post-discharge care. This often leads to preventable medication errors as well as nonadherence. Several barriers to successful discharge counselling, including use of medical jargon, lack of educational ...

OBJECTIVE To describe the development, validity and application of a new instrument (PREPARED) for obtaining feedback from community consumers of discharge planning activities. DESIGN Iterative qualitative and quantitative investigations. SETTING The community catchment area of a metropolitan Australian tertiary public hospital. STUDY PARTICIPANTS Patients aged over 65 years, with a range...

BACKGROUND To reduce avoidable hospital readmissions, effective discharge planning and appropriate post discharge support care are key requirements. This study is a 3-staged process to develop, pretest and pilot a framework for an effective discharge planning system in Hong Kong. This paper reports on the methodology of Delphi approach and findings of the second stage on pre-testing the framewo...

The patient discharge process is one of the most critical and complex healthcare processes as it involves several actors with a variety of skills and roles working towards the outcome of effective and efficient discharge of a patient from a hospital. This paper used a case study of the patient discharge process of two care units in a large urban hospital in which we analysed the process as an a...

BACKGROUND Accurate and timely patient handovers from hospital to other health care settings are essential in order to provide high quality of care and to ensure patient safety. We aim to investigate the effect of a comprehensive discharge bundle, the Transfer Intervention Procedure (TIP), on the time between discharge and the time when the medical, medication and nursing handovers are sent to ...