Understanding the discharge process from the patient and relative perspective

Regular readers will know that Patient Opinion makes over 120,000 patient stories easily accessible and searchable online, for anyone who wants to read them anywhere in the world. These stories come from both Patient Opinion and from NHS Choices.

Recently I've been blogging about some of the research applications of Patient Opinion.

For example, stories from Patient Opinion have been used in:

• a study of regional emergency and urgent care services
• a study of people's experiences of cancer care
• a study of patient views of the nurses who care for them

In this blog post I want to highlight a further small study, of patient and family perspectives on the hospital discharge process.

Hospital discharge

Alex Howat, Rebecca Lawton and Jane Heyhoe of the Bradford Institute for Health Research are planning a study of how the discharge experience older people in hospital could be improved. They undertook a preparatory analysis of a small number (31) of stories on Patient Opinion to help inform the design of the larger study.

The study team has kindly shared a short report of this study, for public access, so you can read the findings for yourself.

Understanding-the-discharge-process-sept-2015.doc (Word format)

Howat et al's report concludes:

"When a patient moves between different care organisations e.g. from hospital to community, they are particularly vulnerable to risk and they often report a poor experience of care.

The experiences of patients who have submitted stories about the discharge of elderly patients from hospital to Patient Opinion are reflected in recent reports on this topic."

Patient Opinion as a research tool

The report says: "Patient Opinion provides rich and varied qualitative data, allowing researchers to easily access first-hand patient and relative experiences spanning a number of years. Accessing qualitative data also speeds up the research process and means that information can be obtained unobtrusively without raising any ethical concerns."

But they also point out that it can be difficult to find exactly the stories you want, using the current search tools. We agree, and we'll be making some changes to our search system which we hope will help with this.

Sharing research online

I have blogged before about the simplicity of undertaking small qualitative studies of specific issues, using the stories patients and carers are contributing to Patient Opinion.

We see these stories as small donations of patient experience for wider public benefit. So we hope that if you carry out a study using the stories here, donated by so many people, you will share the results with us, so everyone can learn and benefit from what you find.

That's how a gift economy works.