1- Tonia Haddow
Affect of Patient Payment Methods on Hospital Discharge And Quality of Care
The articles focused on patient transitions or discharge and how it is challenging for a smooth transfer to another facility or making a patient feel comfortable when their discharge day comes. The journal from Elsevier states that, “care transitions are known to put hospitalized patients at increased risk for error as these are times when patients are between health care providers, teams and settings,” (Conn, et al., 2018). This statement explains that patients in transition are more likely to run into error with their shift because of how many parties and groups they have to go through before the transition is complete. Things like incomplete documentation and medication discrepancies are very common to have error with during transition. I think that there should be clear communication and that is key to a proper and smooth transition.
Quality of care is essential from start to finish; I don’t think that quality of care should be emphasized more during discharge or any one specific time of the patients’ stay. Even though it might not seem like it, there are consequences of patients who have poor quality of care and poor discharge performances. For example, patients may experience adverse events that require hospital re-admission (Conn, et al., 2018). This is something that we should not be running into and the discharge procedure should be thorough and complete regarding the patients’ feeling and state.
2- Isral
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This article looked at the treatment that patients and their families felt during the discharge and transitioning periods from one facility to another. The experiment found that may patients thought that having things in place such as social worker conversations about discharge was very helpful. They also thought that having a positive and helpful staff was also of high importance to them; many of the staff were described as “incredible” during the transition. There were some things that needed improvement such as the emotional support that many patients felt was lacking during and after the transitioning period. There were reports of feelings of depression, shock, or fear when finding out that they were being transferred so suddenly.
Personally, I can understand the patient’s feelings of being rushed and forced to have to transition so suddenly. To counter some of those feelings, I suggest organizations maybe implementing a time frame of which a patient can chose when they want to leave. For example, if a patient is being motioned for discharged, they can be offered a period of a 2-5 day window that they can decide when to leave or not. This gives the patient a sense of some control about their decision of when to leave. Also, as it relates to cost, it may be a method that an organization may be able to budget correctly and thus will have an overall positive impact on the org. I understand that financially, getting people in and out of a facility is the most feasible way to do things, but I also think that it is equally important for an organization to recognize the impression that they are leaving on the patient and their families; and how that affects the overall reputation of the organization. Also, this reminds me of the ACHCA conference that I attended a few months back. The speaker made it a point to take into consideration how their residents feel when they have to transition to another facility. She discussed how important it is to have things in place to make the transition as smooth as possible for the resident. For example, having a person great the family upon arrival of the new facility. Or having someone check in on the family 6 months after the transition has occurred to make sure the resident feels comfortable or has any concerns. Although this may increase the costs for an organization, I feel it is worth the investment because it is important to the brand and reputation of the organization. It makes it more marketable and thus could actually increase the financials of an organization overall.
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