Discharge and follow-up for people with stroke: what happens and why

Objective: To assess the quality of the process of discharge from hospital and follow-up services for people with stroke.

Design: A criterion-based process audit and basic outcome measures, combined with surveys of patients' satisfaction and staff opinion of the service.

Setting: All units treating stroke patients in a health care district including an acute and a community NHS trust, and 23 participating GP practices. Subjects: Process audit: documented notes of 98 stroke patients admitted and discharged over a four-month period. Patient satisfaction survey: 93 surviving stroke patients. Staff opinion survey: general practitioners, hospital doctors, therapists and nurses treating stroke patients throughout the district.

Results: A poor level of service was found. The main shortcomings were poor communication and liaison and a narrow focus of rehabilitation which concentrated on the assessment and provision of basic home care and activities of daily living (ADL) required to obtain discharge. There was a paucity of provision beyond this most basic level and little follow-up after discharge. Pass rates against agreed criteria were: communication between staff and patients/carers 47%, liaison between staff 44%, assessment of home-based needs 48%, assessment of domestic skills 15.5%. Fifty-one per cent of patients were referred for follow-up therapy and of these 72% started follow-up therapy within six weeks of discharge, only 27% had any follow-up assessment of activity levels and well-being. Patients were dissatisfied with the information, support services and therapy they received. The main reasons for the shortcomings were lack of awareness of the services provided, professionals' low expectations of patients' abilities, and limitations of community-based therapy services.

Conclusions: Evidence from other publications suggests that these results do not indicate a service that is any worse than other districts, rather it represents the poor deal offered to stroke patients. By comprehensively assessing several aspects of the service together this methodology has been able to reveal these inadequacies and the reasons for them.