Nurse Assessments Key to Understanding Discharge Readiness

Although the prevention of hospital readmission and use of emergency departments is a vital strategy in reducing health care costs, there has been little research on nurse assessment and patient perceptions of discharge readiness in relation to postdischarge outcomes.  However, a new study published in Medical Care can shed some light on this issue.  INQRI's team at Marquette University conducted a study with 162 adult medical-surgical patients and their discharging nurses from 13 units in four hospitals.  They found low correlations between nurse assessment and patient perceptions of discharge readiness.  In fact, nurses rated patient readiness higher than did the patients.  The team concluded that since nurses' assessment was more strongly associated with postdischarge utilization, formalizing nurse assessment could help identify patients at risk for readmission.

Click here to access the article on the journal website.