Transfer from hospital to nursing home risky for patients
When geriatric patients in New York and around the country return to their nursing homes after a hospitalization, they enter a danger zone for medical errors. When the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services studied data from 2014 about these patient transfers, researchers discovered that close to 25 percent of the people with complicated medical conditions experienced harm within a few days after returning to their nursing facilities. Inadequate follow-up care or monitoring and medication mistakes accounted for the majority of these incidents.