Ways of Improving the Readmission Rate to the Hospital

Compassion and empathy are some of the components needed in the nursing profession. Nurses have many responsibilities during the hospital stay for patients and are great for what they do. In fact, according to a survey by Gallop Polls done on Dec 26, 2017, nurses continue to be as the most honest, trusted, and ethical profession in the United States. Surely, being a nurse probably is not an easy job because they need to treat many patients during a 12-hour shift, but they make sure patient receive the best quality care they can have during the hospital stay. 

In addition, nurses help patients transition from the hospital to their home safely reestablishing life again by teaching patients about their conditions and treatment. Upon admission, nurses are contemplating or already thought of all the nursing interventions they can do during the patient stay in the hospital. However, despite all the efforts the nurses do to treat patients, there are times where nurses may feel guilty or upset because they see one of their patients again readmitted to the hospital. Many things can come to their minds such guilt because they may blame themselves for not doing a good job such as little as teaching properly. 

Other reasons can be patient not compliant with medicine regime, poor diet, or maybe lack of knowledge of their condition. Whether its patient to be blame for not following instructions or not, does effective teaching by nurses improve readmission rate to the hospital? Literature Review: Healthcare providers such as doctors and nurses goal to discharge patients home at their most optimal state and well educated on their conditions they might have, whether it is heart failure, COPD, Diabetes Mellitus, or asthma to prevent relapse and get readmitted to the hospital. There are many teachings method out there that nurses can utilized to teach such as the teach-back method. 

The teach-back method is when the nurse educates the patient about a topic and the patient verbalized or demonstrates back what they learn or understood from the nurse. There have many studies where they evaluated the teach-back method and other strategies. According to a study done in North Carolina Hospital, nurses used the teach-back method during the hospital stay and keep following up with the patients about medications reconciliation and helped reduce readmissions 5.1% over 6 months.. 

Instead of feeling guilt or ashamed, nurses should feel proud of themselves for making a difference in someone life and plus helping the hospital with reimbursement, a reduction of 5.1% of readmission over 6 months is a progress and thanks to their teaching it helped patient not come back to the hospital. Although nurses don’t realize it, frequent teaching is being done with every encounter they have with patient. Teaching can start as soon the patient get stabilized and not necessary wait until discharge to explain and education to the patient. 

The article, “How to prepare Families for Discharge in the limited Time Available, supports how a new or experience nurse did great job teaching patients every time they interact with the patient, however they needed to assess the patient way of learning and choose the proper tool or strategy to teach the patient during the hospital stay. It proved patient education is most likely to help prevent future disease and readmission.  Stated statistics from multiple studies proven again that the teach-back education strategy has reduce readmissions rate, for example, one study showed three of 23 patients readmitted within 30 days, resulting a readmission rate decreased to 13%.

In addition, patient reported the teach-back method done by the nurses helped them understand better about dietary changes and medication and diet regimen. According to another study called the Re-Engineered Discharge, which was a callback program where nurses continue to offer education to patients thru the phone show a decrease 30-day readmission in a community hospital.