Results of activities of this unit during initial six month period:
September/11/2005 – March/11/2006

This unit started its activities with the aim of increasing patients' and their families' ambitions for performing physician's orders after discharge. Results of this follow up showed that in only 6% of the patients the obtained information was not enough. Only 14 (2.8%) cases had revisited in the hospital, which was an incredible result. One of the major reasons for this may be omission of chronic and degenerating diseases which usually result in death. But from a total of 500 patients only 21 (4%) had died. Therefore our investigators believe that one of the causes is increase in ambition to consume drugs, obey physician orders, and repeated visit to the clinic may be possible reasons. Visiting other medical centers may be another causes' but high patient satisfaction (75%) proves the opposite. On the other hand data gathering bias in the present situation has also been taken into consideration.
Therefore we think that the function of this unit has been effective in enhancing patient –physician relationship and most patients with chronic cardiac and pulmonary diseases had not needed readmission by precisely performing drug orders and regularly visiting their physicians.
During long term follow up it is expected that repeated visits increase. But encouragement of home care of patients along with regular visits of physicians and coworkers after their first hospital admission seem to be other reasons for dramatic decrease in readmission to the hospital.
 It seems that future studies should be based on the effect of function of this unit on different groups of patients receiving and not receiving such services in order to clarify the role it plays in promoting patient management.


Patientcare Activities