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.
