This should be Happy Patient Day all over America.

What happens when you leave the hospital to go home?

What happens when you have to undergo some kind of anesthesia in an outpatient center, either for a test or a procedure?

What happens when the patient is not able to follow what is to happen, what just happened or what he or she should do once home? People whose brains work as they are supposed to often find this kind of information a challenge, to say the least.

As the health care system became increasingly—the word used for this chaos is “fragmented”—increasingly patients, their families and friends found themselves lost, trying to plug in information gaps and, in general, helping make things work on their own. They called doctors back. They asked nurses for help.

And so it has been since the explosion of outpatient procedures made many inpatient ones cases which could be done in an outpatient center, with the patient able to go home to recuperate.

Didn’t that sound great? Getting better in your own bed?

Well, yes and no.

Yes to your own bed.

No to the confusion. No to the potential delays in the patient’s progress which result from family caregivers not being health care professionals. No to the setbacks which can occur when patients don’t have the feedback a nurse can give them when they try to do too much or will not do enough.

Finally, a consensus statement on principles and standards for “managing care transitions” (transitions, in English, are the situations described above) has been developed.

Hospital Journal reports who is responsible for these standards. “…the Transitions of Care Consensus Conference convened a multidisciplinary group that represented more than 30 major medical professional organizations, including general internists, hospitalists, geriatricians, and emergency medicine physicians, and government agencies. This group was charged with identifying a core set of principles for effective care transitions and defining a set of standards to achieve the basic tenets of those principles.” (See chart below to read what they agreed upon.”

When this many medical professional groups and government agencies are participants, this is a statement which will hold up. The next stage is getting it out and in use on the front lines.

Read this. Know what is in it so that you know what to ask for and what to expect in this transitions.

This is a major victory for everyone involved: Patients, their family care-givers and professional care-givers alike.

Everyone will do better when the consensus statement becomes not news, but routine.

Hospital Journal