Raising the bar for patient experience during care transitions in Canada: A repeated cross-sectional survey evaluating a patient-oriented discharge summary at Ontario hospitals

Patient experience when transitioning home from hospital is an important quality metric linked to improved patient outcomes. We evaluated the impact of a hospital-based care transition intervention, patient-oriented discharge summary (PODS), on patient experience across Ontario acute care hospitals....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2022-10, Vol.17 (10), p.e0268418-e0268418
Main Authors: Okrainec, Karen, Chaput, Audrey, Rac, Valeria E, Tomlinson, George, Matelski, John, Robson, Mark, Troup, Amy, Krahn, Murray, Hahn-Goldberg, Shoshana
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Admission and discharge
Biology and Life Sciences
Caregivers
Clustering
Communication
Confidence intervals
Cross-sectional studies
Design
Discharge planning
Evaluation
Hospitals
Medicine and Health Sciences
Patients
People and places
Quality management
Questions
Research and Analysis Methods
Social Sciences
Surveys
Transitional care
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Summary:Patient experience when transitioning home from hospital is an important quality metric linked to improved patient outcomes. We evaluated the impact of a hospital-based care transition intervention, patient-oriented discharge summary (PODS), on patient experience across Ontario acute care hospitals. We used a repeated cross-sectional study design to compare yearly positive (top-box) responses to four questions centered on discharge communication from the Canadian Patient Experience Survey (2016-2020) among three hospital cohorts with various levels of PODS implementation. Generalized Estimating Equations using a binomial likelihood accounting for site level clustering was used to assess continuous linear time trends among cohorts and cohort differences during the post-implementation period. This research had oversight from a public advisory group of patient and caregiver partners from across the province. 512,288 individual responses were included. Compared to non-implementation hospitals, hospitals with full implementation (>50% discharges) reported higher odds for having discussed the help needed when leaving hospital (OR = 1.18, 95% CI = 1.02-1.37) and having received information in writing about what symptoms to look out for (OR = 1.44, 95% = 1.17-1.78) post-implementation. The linear time trend was also significant when comparing hospitals with full versus no implementation for having received information in writing about what symptoms to look out for (OR = 1.05, 95% CI = 1.01-1.09).
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0268418