Hospital Discharge Strategy at a Governmental Hospital in Qatar

Preparing a patient for hospital discharge takes time, especially when complicated by medication preparation and reconciliation, patient education, and discharge summary documentation. Therefore, the healthcare managers and administrators should have tangible policies for discharging patients to avoid unnecessary readmissions linked to wasteful hospital expenditures. A single case study design was applied to investigate the varied inputs from different administrators within one setting and obtained information related to optimal patient discharge practices bounded by time and place. The hospital had six departments, the departments including pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, surgery, burns, medicine, and an intensive care unit. One toolkit designed to reduce readmission rates is the Re-Engineered Discharge (RED) toolkit. This strategy is an evidenced based approach with the three-fold aim of ensuring that patients understand how to care for themselves, reducing emergency visits and readmissions, and improving patient satisfaction. As for implementing RED, several specific indicators could be used depending on the context specific to the hospital. These indicators should be meaningful, credible, feasible, and timely. As a result of this study, both patient educations, planning for outpatient appointments and telephone follow-up by clerical or nursing staff were shown to have successfully reduced readmission rates for patients discharged to home. The hospital setting involved in the study introduced the admission-discharge lounge that helps, first, to accommodate patients that are already discharged in the inpatient but are not yet ready to leave the hospital for personal reasons. This prompts the process of clearing bed spaces for other admissions. Second, is by transferring the patient to the admission-discharge lounge, giving the patient and families time to support the discharge instruction education because now patients receive the instructions twice, once from the inpatient, and also from the lounge.

Keywords:Hospital Discharge; RED Toolkit; Readmissions; Admission-discharge lounge

Abbreviations:RED toolkit: Re-Engineered Discharged toolkit; AHRQ: The Agency for Health Research and Quality