Is the Discharge Liaison team improving the well-being of patients over the age of 60 that are admitted in the medical wards at Mater Dei Hospital?

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify if any kind of improvements in older adults' well-being resulted from the initiative implemented in 2013, to introduce the Discharge Liaison team at Mater Dei Hospital. This study gives ground and promotes the conduction of further research on this service. The design methodology implemented in this study includes the perspective of the Discharge Liaison team members whom are all nurses by profession and the social workers working at this hospital. Semi-structured interviews were conducted on a total of ten participants, five of which were members of the Discharge Liaison team, and the other five participants were social workers whom mainly work with older adults. For data analysis, the "A Step-by-Step Guide to Qualitative Data Analysis", proposed by O’Connor and Gibson (2003), was used. By combining perspectives, this study analysed in depth to see if and how services provided by the Discharge Liaison team are integrated to provide a holistic treatment. Data showed that the Discharge Liaison team is indeed enhancing older adults' well-being. Even so the measurements for these results were based on certain aims such as a decrease in the length of stay at the hospital, and the variation of community services, which are only a few aspects amongst several others. This study also provides an inside look of what services, the Discharge team is lacking. Even though I came across several studies about discharge teams in other countries, the Discharge Liaison team at Mater Dei adopted a rather less frequently used structure, involving only nurses as team members. Additionally, although this team promotes continuity of care for a discharge patient, this service is not providing any community based services such as home visits. Findings show that members of this team are putting forward suggestions to both involve other professionals to provide a more comprehensive care plan and to provide some kind of actual service in the community themselves. This study also encourages other researchers to continue analyse the Discharge Liaison team service in the Maltese context. Even though the main aim of this study is to provide findings of the effectiveness and efficiency of the Discharge Liaison services, no kind of service-user input was included. Due to certain limitations this was not possible, and thus social workers' perspectives were included to provide a less biased study.