Abstract
In recent years, subacute care units (SCUs) have emerged as alternatives to acute
hospitalization for selected emergency department (ED) patients who might benefit
from a short period of inpatient stay within a less acute setting. We developed a
new protocol to directly admit selected older patients from our acute hospital's (AH)
ED to the SCU of a partner community hospital, making use of our ED's short-stay ward
as a transit area to overcome administrative, financial, and clinical barriers. The
new protocol has removed the need for intervening stays of longer than 24 hours at
our AH, reduced overall length of stay across both institutions, decreased hospital
admissions, and reduced the number of patient hand-offs.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: July 25, 2020
Identification
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© 2020 AMDA - The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine.
