For the week of 10/19/09, I spent a total of 3 hours with my preceptor. One of the main things that we did was to attend a Discharge Planning Task Force meeting. On the Rehab Care Unit, they have been having problems with getting the patients discharged in an organized manner. They want to make sure that all loose ends are taken care of before the day of discharge so that families only have to worry about going home on discharge day. This involves physicians writing the appropriate orders in a timely manner, nursing, rehab, and respiratory therapy making sure that all of the education and rooming in has been appropriately done and documented, and case management arranging for all of the home care and equipment. So, many disciplines were present at this meeting. They decided to start having discharge conferences including family, once they have a tentative DC date. They also decided to update the kardex to show all completed education and roomings in. Lastly, they decided that they needed to have written criteria to determine a successful rooming in.
It was great to see all of these people working together and how much could be accomplished when getting everyone in a room together.
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That's great that your facility has designed a task force to address patients being discharged in a timely manner because this problem can truly cause a bottleneck in the hospital and ultimately affect patient care. I believe this is also a patient safety issue as well. That's awesome that everyone were able to collaborate to help achieve this goal.
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