Trying to learn more about hospital/physician's office discharge

Nurses Relations

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Hello all, I am a student trying to learn more about the process of hospital or physician's office discharge. My main question is what are some general questions that one is asked at the discharge desk? What general information needs to be verbally expressed to patients being discharged? If there are a few questions or statements that are generally used, would any of you be willing to share? Any response is greatly appreciated; I am just trying to learn all that is possible. Thank you!

Specializes in Psych, Corrections, Med-Surg, Ambulatory.

Is this homework? What do you mean by physican's office discharge? Do you mean post-procedure?

Take a moment and think: what do you think the patient needs to be aware of, before going home? Let us know what you come up with, and we'll try to help guide you further.

Specializes in Psych, Addictions, SOL (Student of Life).

Same thought here - Is this homework? While we are generally willing to help we don't want to do your work for you, because you won't learn anything that way.

Still I normally do discharge teaching throughout the hospital stay with final instructions on day of discharge with patient verbalizing understanding of said teaching.

Hppy

No, it is not homework. It is research for an innovation class that I am in. I'd also like to clarify that I am a civil engineering student and the project that I am working on in the class is with managers of interpreter services in a nearby health network. Also, I'd like to point out that whatever solution we do come up with will not be implemented into any health network. This is simply for a capstone project.
Through research we have found out what nurses like and dislike about current processes and we do recognize that there's so much energy and time that one may have while at work, given all that you all do. Every week we report to the professor on our findings about the healthcare industry pertaining to the difficulties of communication with patients that may speak different languages during the arrival and discharge process or gained knowledge of what current processes are. Initially, we started off exploring what nurses do on the floor and we tried suggesting a technology to our project clients that would potentially ease interpretation on the floor; however, we soon realized that we would not make an impact on the floor as nurses and doctors already have their processes and almost every health network around the US is doing similar things in terms of interpretation. Therefore, we changed gears to see if we could improve the arrival and departure process in terms of interpretation/translation. Right now we are on the search to speak to people in the industry to see if there even is anything we could improve in the process.
Truly, I am just trying to dive deep into the topic and the way our professor wants us to do so is by talking to people in the field. So far I have spoken with patients that have told me what happened when they were discharged from a hospital, for example: given instructions as to how to take care of themselves when leaving. The capstone team at the moment is trying to find out if there's a standardized process and if so, can some type of interpretation technology be helpful other than whatever currently exists.

Specializes in Psych, Addictions, SOL (Student of Life).
On 4/15/2019 at 3:14 PM, kik220 said:


Truly, I am just trying to dive deep into the topic and the way our professor wants us to do so is by talking to people in the field. So far I have spoken with patients that have told me what happened when they were discharged from a hospital, for example: given instructions as to how to take care of themselves when leaving. The capstone team at the moment is trying to find out if there's a standardized process and if so, can some type of interpretation technology be helpful other than whatever currently exists.

Every hospital, physicians office or outpatient clinic will have it's own process. The biggest challenge where I work is having a reliable system to translate discharge instructions to patients who are not English speaking. Translations have to be done my certified medical translators. We use a language line by phone but it often takes 10 to 15 minutes to get a translator on the line. This is precious time that is lost to other patients. Come up with a reliable translation system and I'll be super happy.

Hppy

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