3 days Ago
Challenges After Leaving the Hospital
Prof. De Jongh has been doing research on trauma patients for the last 20 years. She stated that hospital care for trauma patients is generally well-organized and highly structured. Emergency medical workers and surgeons follow established protocols for providing immediate and effective care to trauma victims. However, once they are discharged from the hospital, they are faced with several physical, emotional, and psychological challenges that they never really expected.
Prof. De Jongh mentioned that many trauma patients have no understanding of how they will recover once they get home from the hospital. Every day life can become challenging due to obligations to work and family, and many trauma patients are having difficulty adjusting to their current situations.
Limitations of Current Evaluation Methods
Most hospitals use common questionnaires to determine if a patient is recovering from their injuries by quantifying variables such as pain and mobility. However, according to Prof. de Jongh, standard questionnaires do not research or reflect the entire picture of how an individual is recovering from their traumatic injury. The ability of a patient to recover from a traumatic injury will also often depend on their need to pursue hobbies, continue working, or maintain the same lifestyle they were leading before their traumatic accident.
Prof. De Jongh described the severity of the accident and how the patient experiences it as a significant life event that will happen to very few people in their lives. Even though there is a high likelihood that very few people will experience this type of significant life event, the medical community will often only concentrate on giving the necessary treatment and services for the physical injuries.
Call for Patient-Centred Care
Prof. De Jongh is calling for hospitals to begin focusing on patient-centred communication as early as possible during the treatment process. Nurses should be asking trauma patients questions about their home life, work, and hobbies to be able to provide care based on what an individual will require for their own unique recovery.
Digital tools should be established to provide patients with the necessary tools to aid in their recovery after being discharged from the hospital.
Additionally, she wants all hospitals to begin working in conjunction with community services, providers of social support, and physiotherapy clinics and service providers to assist trauma patients in their recovery.
Once again, Prof. De Jongh believes physiotherapy should be established as a service that can be included in the basic healthcare insurance system. Prof. De Jongh believes that while establishing physiotherapy as a benefit for trauma patients will increase the cost of the immediate care to the healthcare system, it will ultimately enable a faster recovery period and return to work by the trauma services user, which in essence will ultimately decrease the overall cost of care over a longer period.
