http://goo.gl/lMxGne
The Ohio State University (OSU) Wexner Medical Center looked at the medical records over 250 seniors who were treated and evaluated at its trauma center. The study came up with some surprising results, with nearly one-third of this patient group returning to the emergency department (ED) within 90 days after they were discharged.
“We have a lot of older adults that fall and we see them in the ER,” Lauren Southerland, MD, an emergency physician with OSU who specializes in geriatric care, told Home Health Care News. “We studied who had come to the ED, and found that if they had hit their heads, a lot of them were coming back. Head trauma made a person 2.5 times more likely to come back to the ED. It’s not at all what we expected to see.”
The biggest problem was what happened to patients after they returned home from an ED visit related to a fall.
“When we looked reasons why people were returning [to the hospital], a lot of the problems were related to the initial fall,” Southerland said. “A lot of them fell again within the next few months.”