New institutionalisation following an acute hospital admission

Jenni Harrison is a Clinical Research Fellow in Geriatric Medicine funded by the Alzheimer Scotland Dementia Research Centre and the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. Here she discusses her recently published paper in Age and Ageing. She tweets @JenniKHarrison.

New care home admission (also termed new institutionalisation) following an acute hospital admission occurs commonly in the UK. However, national policy documents argue the practice should generally be avoided. Furthermore it is known to be an area of six-fold variation in practice

However, research to understand new care home admission has been limited and little is known about those who experience this extremely important transition. Our interdisciplinary research study evaluated one hundred people admitted from home to a single hospital who were newly admitted to institutional care at the time of discharge.