State hospital patients discharged to nursing homes: are hospitals dumping their more difficult patients?

In March 1978 the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation, in collaboration with the Texas Department of Health, began a large-scale follow-up and evaluation of state hospital patients placed in nursing homes. Phase one, reported here, compared the social, physical, and psychiatric functioning of a sample of almost 500 patients placed in nursing homes and a matched sample retained in the hospitals. On a large number of variables, the nursing home patients were found to be functioning significantly better at the time of placement than the patients retained in the hospitals. Thus the hospitals appear not to be dumping their more debilitated patients, and the screening process in use in the hospitals appear to be working.