Challenges in Transitions Between Care Facilities

The New Old Age Blog discusses the challenges family caregivers face when a patient is transferred between care facilities, such as from a hospital to a rehab center or home. Caregiver Carol Levine shares her experience and a new campaign designed to improve the process.

It wasn’t that Ms. Levine resented the hard work and time commitment, she said, but rather that nobody in the hospital had prepared her for what would happen in rehab, just as the rehab staff would not prepare her for what lay ahead once she took her husband home. Until Howard Levine’s death last year, aides cared for him 12 hours a day. The rest of the time, Ms. Levine handled these duties on her own. It was a daunting experience that I suspect few of us would survive without resorting to a nursing home. What galled her the most, though, was being ignored or disrespected by professionals and left to fend for herself.

As a result, transitions from one care setting to another have informed Ms. Levine’s writing, research and advocacy as director of the families and health care project at the United Hospital Fund of New York. Now that preoccupation has culminated in an ambitious campaign called Next Step in Care, which launched on Tuesday with a Web site designed to help health care professionals and family caregivers learn to handle these hand-offs, as they are known in the trade, in a way that is safer for the patient and less frightening for the caregiver.