[Effect of a Discharge Planning Educational Program in a University Hospital]

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a discharge planning educational program on multidisciplinary team staff in a community. We provided training to nurses of a university hospital. The training covered an introduction to discharge planning, decision-making support, home care medicine and home nursing care, the medical social welfare system, and case review meetings. It was conducted every year from September through February between 2012 and 2015. Before and after the training, the awareness of nurses was evaluated by using self-administered questionnaires and the Discharge Planning scale for Ward Nurses(DPWN), and discharge planning satisfaction was measured using a visual analogue scale (VAS). The study process was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of Tokyo Women's Medical University. The questionnaires were distributed to 96 nurses; of these, responses of 72 nurses(pre- and post-training)were analyzed(response rate: 75.0%). The average number of years of nursing experience was 8.5± 7.7. The total score of the DPWN and its subscales, as well as the VAS, with regard to satisfaction level significantly increased after the training(p<0.01), indicating that training improved nurses' awareness of discharge planning practices.