Scale measures quality of hospital discharge process: brief questionnaire is valid.

Researchers have developed various tools to give discharge planners and physicians objective ways to determine whether patients are ready to be discharged from the hospital to home.

One new tool, called B-PREPARED scale, provides a brief but thorough system of measuring a patient's readiness.

The new tool is based on a scale developed by Karen Grimmer-Somers, PhD, associate professor, Centre for Allied Health Research, University of South Australia, North Tce, Adelaide, Australia. (1)

The B-PREPARED scale was administered one week after discharge and can be used to evaluate a hospital's discharge interventions and for quality improvement efforts.

"Dr. Grimmer and her group had done focus groups to get down the qualities that would measure what we value," says James F. Graumlich, MD, FACP, associate professor of medicine and clinical pharmacology and interim chair in the department of medicine at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria.

"But the scoring system wasn't optimal for what we wanted to use in our particular research," Graumlich notes. "If there was no response, it would give a missing response score, and that turns out to be problematic when doing statistics, so we changed the scoring response system."

For example, in the original scoring system, if a person was asked whether he or she received information about medication side effects and had no response because he or she wasn't sent home with any medication, then the person would be missing points on that question, Graumlich explains.