Patient readmission and discharge in a healthcare setting is a process that requires numerous professional considerations to ensure that the healthcare of the patient is improved. It is the role of the healthcare practitioners to assure that patients, discharged, take good care of their health against readmission over the same illness, mainly if it is not a chronic illness that requires treatment appointments for long-term treatment. Patients’ discharge is a process that requires different considerations to make sure that patients and their loved ones understand the type of illness that had been facing the patient and how to take care of the illness and follow the doctor’s prescription for successful recovery (Meo et al., 2020). Through the discharge process, different challenges are faced within the healthcare system, most of which must be resolved to ensure that patients receive the most effective and reliable discharge help towards improving their health quality after discharge.
Poor health illness literacy amongst patients is a challenge that many patients face upon discharge. They must be trained on the illness facing them and how to care for themselves through the healing process and prevent it in the future. These are the roles of healthcare practitioners, but in most cases, the roles are not achieved due to internal healthcare challenges like clinical officer shortage and high discharge rates of patients, especially mentally ill patients. Based on these challenges in rehabilitation centres, change of the system is essential through the facilitation of discharge goals checklist analysis for the patients. Through the checklist goals, healthcare practitioners and discharge coordinators can evaluate patients’ understanding of the illness and how they will care for themselves after discharge to avoid any readmission cause (Meo et al., 2020). The process of discharge of the patients for improvement of their health quality must start early enough to ensure that upon release, the checklist goals are attained by healthcare practitioners, and patients are conversant of their health illness and how to take care of themselves after discharge.
Reference
Meo, N., Liao, J. M., & Reddy, A. (2020). Hospitalized after medical readiness for discharge: A multidisciplinary quality improvement initiative to identify discharge barriers in general medicine patients. American Journal of Medical Quality, 35(1), 23–28. Web.