Pediatric post-acute care hospital transitions: an evaluation of current practice

After discharge from an acute care hospital, some children require ongoing care at a post-acute care hospital. Care transitions occur at both admission to the post-acute care hospital and again at discharge to the home/community. Our objective was to report the current practices used during the admission to and discharge from 7 pediatric post-acute care hospitals in the United States.

Participants from 7 pediatric post-acute care hospitals completed a survey and rated the frequency of use of 20 practices to prepare and support children and their families during both admission to the hospital and at time of discharge to the home/community. For consistency with existing literature, practices were grouped into 4 previously reported categories: assessment, communication, education, and logistics. Descriptive statistics were used to report the frequency of use within practices and between hospitals.

Only 2 of 10 admission practices and 3 of 10 discharge practices were reportedly "always" used by all hospitals. Assessment and communication practices were reported to be more frequently used (57%-100% of the time) than education and logistic procedures. Between hospitals, only the reported frequency of use of the discharge practices was statistically significantly different (P = .03).

Variability exists in transition practices among 7 post-acute care pediatric hospitals. This report is the first known to detail the frequency of use of admission and discharge practices for pediatric post-acute care hospitals in the United States.