Difficult to Place Patients: Finding a New Path
Session Description (for use in the program and for marketing purposes)
Hospitals are seeing an increase in length of stay for complex patients. At Sacred Heart we started a program to focus on barriers to discharge they include: homelessness, progressing dementia, need for guardianship, history of TBI, Psych issues, Addiction, Adult Protective services involvement, and needing to apply for Medicaid. This program goal is to get these people a permanent placement in the community.This program includes Social Work, Behavior Therapy, Recreation Therapy, Nursing and Nursing Assistants. We started this program in Jan 2017 and it continues today. Working as a team we were able to address the complex issues with these patients, identify goals, set daily schedules, develop social skills and practice social living. I will identify the challenges we faces and how we have been able to successfully place over 80 patients that had lengths of stay from 90 to 380 days saving the hospital over $5 million dollars.