What You Should Bring Home From the Hospital

March 17, 2009

Tuesday, March 17, 2009; HE02

Jack, an associate professor of family medicine at the Boston University

School of Medicine, says he heard too many stories of patients' leaving the

hospital with insufficient instructions -- such as the woman who wasn't told

that the blood-pressure-lowering drug prescribed at discharge replaced the one

she had at home. She took both and was soon back in the hospital with kidney

failure, Jack says.

So his team of researchers launched a study comparing two groups of patients

heading home from the Boston Medical Center. One group, of 370 patients,

received spoken and written information from a specially trained nurse and a

follow-up call from a pharmacist several days after leaving. The other group,

which had 368 patients, got a less intensive review, no printout and no

follow-up call. The more intensively trained patients had 30 percent fewer

hospital readmissions or emergency room visits, according to results published

recently in the ls of Internal Medicine.

For now, no standards apply to what a discharge program should entail, but the

BU team has developed a checklist that hospital patients can use as they exit.

Be sure to ask about, and get written answers on:

-- why you were hospitalized.

-- what medicines to take and how to take them.

-- what to do if your condition changes.

-- whether the hospital will set up follow-up appointments, or whether that is

up to the patient or caregiver.

-- how to get information on tests for which results were not ready at the time

of discharge.

Some hospitals have set new discharge standards of their own. At Suburban

Hospital in Bethesda, for example, the staff uses a computer-based program to

provide a printout of customized instructions for each outgoing patient,

including recommended follow-up care. " The software allows us to incorporate

instructions [including ones for medications] from many departments, " says Ronna

Borenstein-Levy, a spokeswoman for the hospital.

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