Little Data Available to Show Effectiveness of Long-Term Care Hospitals Transfers
June 09, 2010
Hospitals are increasingly transferring patients to long term-care facilities after a critical illness, but there is little data to guide such decisions or to verify whether these facilities are effective, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study said just over half of patients in long-term acute care hospitals die within a year of discharge and that rate has risen slightly in recent years.
Traditionally, these patients spent their entire acute-care episode in a general medical-surgical hospital, but from 1997-2006, the number of long-term acute care hospitals more than doubled and the number of patients in them nearly tripled.
"Long-term outcomes of the chronically critically ill are poor, with substantial need for new approaches to their care," he study stated.
Read the JAMA article on long term-care hospitals.
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