How Can Hospital Readmission Rates Help Us Improve Care?

A recent study out of Canada found that different regions of the country experienced different rates of readmission into the hospital after someone suffered from some sort of cardiac event. Researchers found that individuals that had been hospitalized with atrial fibrillation, stroke, heart failure, or a heart attack were much more likely to be readmitted into the hospital within 30 days if they lived in Northern Ontario than those that lived in Southern Ontario.

 

There are a number of reasons why this might happen, and the researchers posited a few suggestions for why this might be occurring. Southern Ontario is more urbanized, and because of the closer access to city hospitals, researchers believe that this helped the short term recovery of patients. Another reason why could be more long term in nature. Because patients in Northern Ontario might not be receiving the same quality of healthcare throughout their lives, recovery from a cardiac event might be more difficult. As you can probably guess, there’s still a lot of opportunity for research here.

 

The researchers published their findings in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.

 

Hospital readmission rates can help us to find shortcomings in our care system–and then improve them.

 

For us in California, this study might not look like it has any bearing on what we do. But actually, there’s a lot that can be learned here. The big thing is that quality care is important. Care of any sort is expensive, and by providing better preventative care and follow up treatments, the cost of care can be reduced, and elderly individuals can live a better quality of life at the same time. We can also see that not everyone has the same access to care. Wherever we find holes in our healthcare system, we should be doing our best to try and fix those things so that more people can live better lives.

 

If you have a loved one who has recently left the hospital for whatever reason, it stands to reason that they are at a higher risk of dealing with future health issues than others might be. There are things that you can do on your end to help them. Besides making sure that they have access to high quality medical care and keep all of their doctors’ appointments, ensuring that your mom or dad is receiving good senior care can also help them in this respect.

 

Paradise In-Home Care can help you. If you’re looking for the best in-home care solution for your elderly loved one, give us a call. We can schedule a free consultation and go over what we do, and help you to determine whether or not our services will meet the needs of your family. Each family situation is different, and we want to help you find the right custom solution to meet and surpass the needs of your parent or grandparent. We might not be the perfect fit for you, and if we’re not, we’ll let you know. We can help you to get pointed in the right direction so that regardless of which service you go through you can be assured that your family is getting the very best help that they can.

 

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