Home Health Rejection and Your Grandma
It has been shown that 28% of people discharged from the hospital reject home health services. Most of these are seniors and the do it because they just want to be left alone. “Refusing home health care after a hospitalization puts patients at risk of a difficult, incomplete or slower-than-anticipated recovery. Without these services, older adults’ odds of being readmitted to the hospital within 30 or 60 days double”. You know what that means, right? It means bad scores for the doctors and for the hospitals. That’s the real travesty. Forget patient independence. Forget free will. We are talking Press Ganey scores here! We are talking quality metric scores here! We are talking less bonuses for the hospital CEO! Something needs to be done to fix this. I hear the term Soylent Green being whispered around at hospital meetings. What does that mean?
…………. And in the end, the primary care practitioners get blamed for it!! Stay out of Pri-care students!! Vote with your feet!! Run, run, run from the slaughterhouse that will eat you alive! 😉
It also means that seniors are risking expensive re-admissions that they won’t have to pay for. Being on government care means you shouldn’t have the option, and should have to accept home health, or foot your own bill.
There’s no evidence that letting the home health people into your house lowers the rate of re-admissions. But if you like living in a nanny state . . .
Great points! The ethics of caring for the elderly are more and more threatened. It’s another case of “appearing” to do the right thing instead of actually doing it.
The underlying tone of contempt is universal. People don’t know what’s good for them, and we’re going to give it to them good and hard. Our latest invention (medical homes, telehealth, HMO) would work if it wasn’t for the stupidity, ignorance and stubbornness of the beneficiaries.
That’s the problem underlying a lot of these failures in healthcare and elsewhere.