Transitional Care Centres : A ray of hope for patients requiring medical care post-treatment

On average around 250 million patients are discharged across Indian hospitals annually. By a conservative estimate, 75 per cent of them are medically fit to go home while the remaining 25 per cent require additional support either in the form of long-term acute care, skilled nursing care, transitional care with medical inputs, inpatient rehabilitation support and assistance in mobility in bed or to come out of bed or for getting trained to resume their livelihoods.

Closer home, hospitals in Hyderabad on a daily average discharge around 1,000 patients, who still need rehab services. This number is expected to rise by close to three times in the next four-five years.

These individuals may no longer need acute care administered by hospitals but then they may not be ready to go home. Family members of such patients need not get worried about managing the recovery path of their loved ones. Help is at hand and comes in the form of professionally -manned transitional care centers that provide the humane touch as would a family member.

The cornerstone of these centers is the post-discharge services provided to patients recovering after the hospital attends to their illness or after a surgical or invasive procedure, including organ transplant.

Raising a glimmer of hope are the new-generation, adult transitional care centers.

Dedicated to intensive physiotherapy, skilled nursing and other equally critical medical rehabilitation services during stressful periods of ill-health, especially post-hospitalization, the personnel should strive to provide quality transitional and rehabilitative care.

Patients who need to recoup after a complex medical condition with individualized care, need scientifically structured facilities, including therapeutic rehabilitation for neuro, spine injury, ortho and sports, pulmonary and cancer rehabilitation, physiotherapy, and therapies ranging from occupational, speech and swallow to nutritional therapy, apart from rehab counselling.

He points out that the aim is to help reduce hospital readmission rate and improve long-term patient outcomes so as to improve their efficiency metrics. Priority is attending to the hapless elderly.

The cost of managing patients in transitional care centers ranges from 20 to 25 per cent of the cost incurred in a tertiary hospital bed. These centres go a long way in reducing the economic burden, which in itself a great service given the future demographic indications of a rise in the elderly patients and chronic disease incidences, while underlying the importance of care centers.

After periodic patient assessments, they update the patient’s primary doctors of the condition, he says while affirming that transitional care centers are complementary to hospitals

The center has two locations in the city-MLA Colony, Banjara Hills Road No 12 and Jayabheri Pine Valley Colony, near CARE Hospital, Gachibowli.

(Ph: 9666671107, 04067107107, 18004197107

Website: www.ucchvas.com)