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Here's a common hospital discharge scenario: the patient is ready to be discharged home, and the hospital has a discharge planner or case manager who is prepared to call the patient's primary care physician (PCP) to discuss the patient's post-discharge care. But who does the discharge planner call? And will anyone respond to the call?
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Mistakes happen even to the best clinicians. This is why hospitals increasingly are relying on checklists and other tools to assist clinicians in the discharge process.
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Calling patients after hospital discharge is a good quality improvement and patient satisfaction strategy, but it is often difficult to implement because of resource restraints.
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The health care system benefits when unnecessary hospital admissions are avoided, and sometimes the best place to impact that trend is by focusing discharge services on the hospital emergency department (ED), an expert says.
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Hospitalized patients with terminal illnesses often feel abandoned by their physicians at the end of their lives. Their physicians might experience a lack of closure that is unsettling.
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Despite dramatic and widely reported breakthroughs in preventing bloodstream infections, the cold truth is that too many infection preventionists labor in obscurity, their programs woefully underfunded by administrators blind to the power of prevention.
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Infection preventionists must seize an extraordinary moment in health care, when divergent forces are aligning to redesign a system that has failed to contain costs and protect the lives to which it has been entrusted, Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, said recently in New Orleans in the keynote address at the 37th annual educational conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).
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Alarming public health officials, a highly drug-resistant gram negative bacterial strain that is emerging rapidly in hospitals in India has been detected in patients in three U.S. states.
