gms | German Medical Science

Background and status of (inter)national research: Discharge from the hospital is a complex setting which is accompanied by the risk of discontinuities in care. In principle, this can be avoided by means of discharge management and by taking transitional care approaches into account. The German expert standard “Discharge Management in Nursing Care” [1] offers a nursing quality-related conceptual framework for this purpose. This standard was updated in 2019. Since then, the assessment of “readiness for hospital discharge” (RHD) from a patient’s perspective has been recommended as a nursing sensitive outcome measure.

Question and objective: The aim was to identify a generic tool for assessing RHD in German hospital care.

Method or hypothesis: A review of literature was conducted in 2021. Resources searched were: PubMed, Cochrane Library, parts of EBSCO, Google Scholar and Springer Link.

Results: 35 relevant international publications were identified mentioning different concepts or criteria for assessing RHD. Within these published articles, 7 different assessment tools were described in 19 studies in total. No studies or tools were reported for the German health care context. For the Swiss context, one study describe a single Item and a second study describe the translation of the short form of the Readiness for Hospital Discharge Scale (RHDS) [2], [3] but in this study RHD was assessed from a nursing perspective.

Discussion: No valid or available tool for assessing RHD in German language was identified. While this concept is already being researched and discussed internationally [3], there exists a research gap in Germany in this regard.

Practical implications: There is a need to conceptualize RHD, in order to develop an appropriate assessment tool for monitoring the quality of hospital discharge management as part of developing a complex intervention.

Appeal for practice (science and/or care) in one sentence: Assessing patients’ perspectives on the Readiness for Hospital Discharge is required to ensure nursing quality of discharge management.