Patient Resources

Care About Your Care is a national conversation highlighting efforts to improve care transitions, reduce avoidable hospital readmissions, and lift overall quality of care.

Age-Related Differences in Perception of Quality of Discharge Teaching and Readiness for Hospital Discharge

May 1, 2010 | Journal Article

Older adults have different discharge needs than the general population and require more help in making care transitions.

Connecting Hospitalized Patients One-on-One with Other Patients Who Have the Same Illness

May 11, 2009 | Program Result Report

From 1994 to 2007, staff at Friends' Health Connection (originally called Long Distance Love), New Brunswick, N.J., created and ran a program that enables hospitalized patients to communicate one-on-one with another patient who has the same illness.

Telephone Interpretation Services Can Serve Hospitals Well

April 6, 2011 | Program Result Report

As the project manager at the University of Michigan said: "We could just grab the phone when patients came in who spoke languages for which we don't have an interpreter."

Expecting Success: Excellence in Cardiac Care

National Program

Expecting Success was a national program aimed at improving the quality of cardiac care while reducing racial, ethnic and language disparities.

Sound Partners for Community Health

January 1, 2001 | Book

The potential of the Internet should not, however, obscure the contribution made by a more traditional means of communications that continues to reach millions of Americans—local radio.

Patient Discharge Instruction Record

June 4, 2008 | Toolkit

Sinai-Grace Hospital in Detroit, Mich., developed a systemwide universal discharge instruction form, merging general discharge instructions with cardiac-specific discharge instructions for patients with acute myocardial infarction or heart failure.

Speaking Together: National Language Services Network

April 18, 2011 | Program Result Report

Ten hospitals throughout the country joined a collaborative learning network, developed strategies to improve the quality and accessibility of their language services, and tested them using five standardized performance improvement measures.

Wisdom at Work: Retaining Experienced Nurses

July 1, 2010 | Program Result Report

RWJF launched Wisdom at Work: Retaining Experienced Nurses in 2006 to build an evidence base for what works to retain experienced nurses in hospital settings and to develop a better understanding of the impact of existing interventions on the work environment for older nurses.

Heart Failure Encounter Form

June 1, 2008 | Toolkit

An off-site, nurse-led heart failure clinic was created to help heart failure patients better control and self-manage their disease post-hospitalization.