Home Care Admission Information: What Nurses Need and What Nurses Have. A Mixed Methods Study

Effective communication between clinicians across care settings is fundamental for continuity of care and decreased risk of errors. The home care admission often starts without important information needed for formulation of the plan of care. We conducted a mixed methods analysis to investigate home care admission information from two perspectives: qualitative information regarding information nurses reported they needed during an admission, and quantitative information regarding information actually available. We mapped both data sets to an international specification for transitions in care information, the Continuity of Care Document (CCD). The information that homecare nurses said they needed mapped sufficiently (90%) to the CCD. Regarding available information: no observation had all the CCD information present; CCD information was missing in varying amounts across the admission documents. Nurses searching among pages of documentation for information which may not be present is inefficient and introduces patient safety concerns of increased risk for errors.