When patients who have been discharged from inpatient care refuse home health care services, they may experience higher rates of readmission to the hospital and a lower quality of life. This issue is not well studied or understood, and in December 2016 UHF's Families and Health Care Project and the Alliance for Home Health Quality and Innovation sponsored a roundtable examining it. This report summarizes the discussion and findings of that roundtable.
The report also contains a number of recommendations, among them interventions that improve communication about care challenges and home health care services, qualitative and quantitative research on all aspects of home health care refusals, policy changes to increase access and coordination, and continuity across providers and care settings.
Read the press release.