- Title
- Health professional perspectives on systems failures in transitional care for patients with dementia and their carers: a qualitative descriptive study
- Creator
- Kable, Ashley; Chenoweth, Lynnette; Pond, Dimity; Hullick, Carolyn
- Relation
- BMC Health Services Research Vol. 15, Issue 567
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-015-1227-z
- Publisher
- BioMed Central
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- Background: Healthcare professionals engage in discharge planning of people with dementia during hospitalisation, however plans for transitioning the person into community services can be patchy and ineffective. The aim of this study was to report acute, community and residential care health professionals' (HP) perspectives on the discharge process and transitional care arrangements for people with dementia and their carers. Methods: A qualitative descriptive study design and purposive sampling was used to recruit HPs from four groups: Nurses and allied health practitioners involved in discharge planning in the acute setting, junior medical officers in acute care, general practitioners (GPs) and Residential Aged Care Facility (RACF) staff in a regional area in NSW, Australia. Focus group discussions were conducted using a semi-structured schedule. Content analysis was used to understand the discharge process and transitional care arrangements for people with dementia (PWD) and their carers. Results: There were 33 participants in four focus groups, who described discharge planning and transitional care as a complex process with multiple contributors and components. Conclusions: Although acute care HPs do engage in required discharge planning for people with dementia, participants identified critical issues: pressure on acute care health professionals to discharge PWD early, the requirement for JMOs to complete discharge summaries, the demand for post discharge services for PWD exceeding supply, the need to modify post discharge medication prescriptions for PWD, the need for improved coordination with RACF, and the need for routine provision of medication dose decision aids and home medicine reviews post discharge for PWD and their carers.
- Subject
- dementia; discharge planning; qualitative analysis; health care professionals
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1328456
- Identifier
- uon:25913
- Identifier
- ISSN:1472-6963
- Rights
- This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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