BACKGROUND home visits and telephone calls are two often used approaches in transitional care but their differential effects are unknown. OBJECTIVE to examine the overall effects of a transitional care programme for discharged medical patients and the differential effects of telephone calls only. DESIGN randomised controlled trial. SETTING a regional hospital in Hong Kong. PARTICIPANTS ...

Abstract Recurrent hospitalizations are responsible for considerable health care spending, although prior studies have shown that a substantial proportion of readmissions are preventable through effective discharge planning and patient follow-up after the initial hospital visit. This retrospective cohort study was undertaken to determine whether telephonic outreach to ensure patient understandi...

BACKGROUND Advance care planning is the process of establishing a patient's goals and preferences for future care. Previous research has demonstrated a need to improve patient-physician communication around advance care planning. A critical time for advance care planning conversations is the day of admission to the hospital. METHODS A survey of internal medicine residents was administered at ...

Advance directives, health care proxies, and living wills are forms of advance planning that permit patients to make decisions regarding their health care and are used when the patient becomes incapacitated. The ethics of allowing these forms of advance planning are questioned when the patient has attempted suicide. The authors present an ethical analysis of a case of an elder patient who overd...

Critical care medicine is a global specialty and epidemiologic research among countries provides important data on availability of critical care resources, best practices, and alternative options for delivery of care. Understanding the diversity across healthcare systems allows us to explore that rich variability and understand better the nature of delivery systems and their impact on outcomes....

PURPOSE Primary care needs new models to facilitate advance care planning conversations. These conversations focus on preferences regarding serious illness and may involve patients, decision makers, and health care providers. We describe the feasibility of the first primary care-based group visit model focused on advance care planning. METHODS We conducted a pilot demonstration of an advance ...

Transitional care research has mainly focused on the experiences of older adults with complex medical conditions. To date, few publications examine the experience of transitional care for non-medically complex older adults. In this article, we draw on and thematically analyze interview and audio-diary data collected at three hospitals in Eastern England, and we explore the experience of transit...