Abstracts by keywords: hospital discharge planning
The current special report from the Expert Council for the Assessment of Developments in the Health Care System (SVR 2012) comprehensively discusses the problems at the interfaces between the outpatient and inpatient sectors. In particular, discharge from hospital is an unprepared admission for vulnerable patients (older age, chronic illness, multimorbidity and/or functional limitations) with numerous risks such as post-hospital health complications, failure to heal, increased psychosocial stress for the patient and their relatives nursing home or readmission to a hospital. The SVR also emphasizes that it has repeatedly pointed out the interface problems as well as implementation and coordination deficits in, among other things, the reports from 2003 and 2007. The fact that “efforts to improve hospital discharge have become even more important” (SVR 2012: 138) is made clear by the current SVR survey. According to this, 78.2% of the hospitals surveyed with more than 50 beds carry out systematic discharge or transfer management and 44.8% have implemented the expert standard discharge management in nursing care (DNQP), with hospitals with a larger number of beds stating significantly more often that they provide these services ( SVR 2012: Tables A-1 and A-2). The SVR also emphasizes that despite this information on the provision of discharge and transition management, “it is not known how successfully this is implemented in practice” (ibid.: 139).