Social work services and patient decision making - Patricia Hansen

This book reports on a study with two parts. The first part focuses on the patients experience of acute hospital care and the second part examines the factors which influence the use of social work resources in providing services to acute hospital patients. This study explores the patients views about the decision making environment in an American acute care hospital. The context is the speedy treatment processes and early discharge of patients in the health care system under a managed care regime. Patients were asked about the treatment and discharge decisions made, the agreements that occurred and the problems they experienced while they were in the hospital and after discharge. Surprisingly, the patients reported little difficulty with the decision making environment although it was evident that many experienced a high level of difficulty once discharged. The second part focuses on the utilization of social work resources for these patients. The study uses an activity based framework to examine the cost drivers for social work intervention. It is the first example of the application of ideas from activity based costing to analysis of social work services in hospital settings.