Many seniors spend weeks to months in a hospital bed, acquiring new health problems and disabilities, only to find themselves living in a nursing home. Health experts claims the problem is that hospitals are better suited to care for healthy surgical patients and acute illnesses and not geared to help frail seniors cope with acute illnesses or flare-ups of chronic conditions. They say hospitals need to identify vulnerable patients with complex needs to quickly address and minimize complications. This detection, they believe, requires that the right information be collected efficiently and reliably and they’re calling for a more efficient health system. They studied the effectiveness of interRAI assessment tools in hospitals and claim they found the instruments easy to use and able to reliably predict, within 24 hours of hospitalization, which older patients would develop complications, which ones were at risk of a long stay, and which ones were at risk of ending up in a nursing home.
NBHC Care Experience