Health visitor intervention to reduce days of unplanned hospital re-admission in patients recently discharged from geriatric wards: the results of a randomised controlled study

Abstract

A randomised controlled trial was conducted to assess whether a single intervention by a health visitor reduced the unplanned re-admission of elderly people discharged from geriatric wards. Two hundred and four consecutive discharges from geriatric wards were randomly allocated to receive either a single visit from the health visitor at 72 h in addition to normal follow-up services or to a control group receiving the normal follow-up services. The primary outcome measure was the unplanned re-admissions over the following 6 months. There were 40 cases and 43 control patients with unplanned re-admissions in the first 6 months. The total lengths of the unplanned re-admissions were 1237 days for cases and 1427 for controls, an average of 12.1 days for cases and 14.0 for controls (95% confidence interval -4.9 to 8.7 days, not significant). A visit by a health visitor to elderly patients after discharge from geriatric wards is unlikely to be of sufficient benefit to the patients for the service to be funded from a saving in unplanned re-admissions.