But a rather stunning study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society suggests the quality of communication between the hospital and the nursing home is horrendous. The study was led by researchers from the University of Wisconsin, including nurse researcher, Dr. Barbara King and Geriatrician Dr. Amy Kind.
Most of the nurses felt that they were left clueless about what happened to the their patient in the hospital. They lacked essential details about their patient's clinical status. The problem was not the lack of paper work that accompanied the patient. In fact, nurses often received reams of paper work, often over 80 pages. The problem is that the paper work was generally full of meaningless gibberish such as surgical flow sheets that told little about what was actually going on. Often the transfer information had errors, conflicted with what the facility was told before the transfer, and lacked accurate information about medications.
Essentially, SNF nurses found themselves asked to care for patients with little sense of what actually happened in the hospital, and little insight into the functional and cognitive status of their patients. These episodes of poor communication led to a number of adverse consequences: