2016 Volume 19 Issue 1 Pages 72-79
Background and purpose: Department of discharge planning has become popular in general hospitals in Japan. In addition, the ward nurses in charge of discharge planning (NCDP) might be effective to encourage the ward nurses' commitment to discharge planning activities. The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics of hospitals with NCDP and the difference of discharge planning activity with and without NCDP among the hospitals with a Department of discharge planning and Discharge planning nurse.
Method: This is a secondary analysis using the data of the nationwide survey of general hospitals with more than 100 beds. The targets of this analysis were hospitals with discharge planning departments and discharge planning nurses. The characteristics of the hospital and discharge planning activity of ward nurses were compared between those with and without NCDP.
Results: Among the 468 hospitals, 213 (45.9%) hospitals had NCDP. In hospitals providing highly specialized medical treatment, such as hospitals specializing in cancer, NCDP tended more to be assigned. Compared to the hospitals not having NCDP, the rate of at which ward nurses are carrying out “making discharge plan sheets”, “finding and negotiation of available social resource and system for patient and the family”, “conducting conference discussing discharge plan soon after admission” and “having guidelines and flow charts describing the procedure of discharge planning” were significantly higher in hospitals with NCDP.
Discussion: The possibility of active participations of ward nurse in discharge planning is higher with the assignment of NCDP to a ward.
