Introduction of a Screening Tool to Support Early Discharge in Special Functioning Hospitals and Evaluation of the Validity of the Screening Tool

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to introduce a screening tool to support early discharge in a special functioning hospital in order to select patients and their families who needed to cooperate with organizations and occupations outside the hospital and use social care services and to evaluate the validity of the tool.
The screening tool was consisted of six items and the cooperation with organizations outside the hospital was judged necessary if even one item among six was positive.
The results were obtained from 227 patients at hospitalization and discharge. The sensitivity and the specificity of the screening tool was 68.6% and 85.0%, respectively. There were few patients who needed to cooperate with the organization outside the hospital with negative screening. There was a significant relation between the necessity and the enforcement of cooperation with organizations outside the hospital.
In addition, patients who were executed cooperation with organizations outside of the hospital showed positive screening at a significantly higher ratio than those who did not. These results demonstrated that the screening tool could predict patients who needed to cooperate with organizations outside the hospital. From the above, the validity of the screening tool was evaluated to a certain extent.