OBJECTIVES this study examined the association between medically recognized urinary incontinence and risk of several disease conditions, hospitalization, nursing home admission and mortality. DESIGN review and abstraction of medical records and computerized data bases from 5986 members, aged 65 years and older, of a large health maintenance organization in northern California. RESULTS there...

In a prospective study we assessed 440 patients, sequentially admitted to the trauma unit with hip fracture. Of the 403 who had a swab on admission, 5.2% (21/403) were found to be colonised with MRSA. Fifty two percent of MRSA colonised patients were admitted from their own home, 29% from residential homes and 19% from nursing homes. MRSA colonisation was found in 3.6% of patients admitted from...

PURPOSE The Providing Assistance to Caregivers in Transition (PACT) program offers nursing home discharge planning and case management for individuals in the transitional period following a return to the community. The PACT program targeted individuals newly admitted to nursing homes and worked with a family caregiver to develop and implement a nursing home discharge plan. DESIGN AND METHOD R...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The most powerful predictors of functional recovery and eventual home discharge among stroke survivors are the initial severity of the stroke and the patient's age. We analyzed a large population of stroke rehabilitation admissions by stratifying subgroups with coherent outcomes in an attempt to define potentially more efficient patterns of providing rehabilitation care. ...

BACKGROUND the Mini Nutritional Assessment is a validated clinical tool for the assessment of nutritional status in older people. Moderate to severe malnutrition is common in elderly patients in hospital and is associated with a poor outcome. OBJECTIVES to determine whether the Mini Nutritional Assessment can predict the outcome of hospital stay in older individuals. SETTING a tertiary-care...

Little is known about the deleterious effects of injurious falls relative to those of other disabling conditions or whether these effects are driven largely by hip fractures. From a cohort of 754 community-living elders of New Haven, Connecticut, we matched 122 hospitalizations for an injurious fall (59 hip-fracture and 63 other fall-related injuries) to 241 non-fall-related hospitalizations. P...

BACKGROUND Acute hospital discharge delays are a pressing concern for many health care administrators. In Canada, a delayed discharge is defined by the alternate level of care (ALC) construct and has been the target of many provincial health care strategies. Little is known on the patient characteristics that influence acute ALC length of stay. This study examines which characteristics drive ac...

OBJECTIVES Identify useful concepts related to the emotional context facing family members of nursing home residents. These concepts can be used in future studies to design and test interventions that benefit family caregivers. DESIGN Secondary data analyses of qualitative ethnographic data. SETTING Two nursing homes in a large Midwestern city; 8 months of data collection in each. PARTICI...

BACKGROUND Long-term care is often associated with high health care expenditures. In the Netherlands, an ageing population will likely increase the demand for long-term care within the near future. The development of risk profiles will not only be useful for projecting future demand, but also for providing clues that may prevent or delay long-term care utilization. Here, we report our identific...

OBJECTIVE Although disabled elderly people mostly prefer to receive care at home or in other community settings, many of them reside in nursing homes. That is why several researchers have tried to identify predictors of institutionalisation. Various different dependency factors seem to explain the request for residential care. The aim of this study is to discover the most important factor trigg...