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When your elderly parent gets a medical emergency that requires inpatient care, you need to know the process to follow to get immediate medical attention. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on essential steps that can delay your elderly parent’s admission.
To get your elderly parent admitted to a hospital, you need first to pack their personal items and assess their condition to see if it warrants emergency transportation. Once you get to the emergency room, you provide their health details and get them admitted for treatment.
The process may be long, mainly because your loved one is suffering, but manageable if you know the steps. This post discusses what you need to do from home to the hospital bed to ensure a smooth admission process.
1. Pack Personal Items
Staying in a hospital is stressful and overwhelming. And failing to carry personal effects for your loved one can make the hospital stay more unbearable. When packing, you should be selective and only carry necessities to supplement what the hospital provides.
Because a hospital maintains controlled temperatures, your loved one will unlikely need heavy clothes. You should pack lightweight garments such as:
- Loose-fitting pajamas.
- A light robe, in case they’ll be in a shared room.
- Underwear, socks, and a bathing towel.
- An eye mask for blocking light while sleeping.
- Rubber sole slippers to keep them from sliding.
For personal care, you’ll pack items like:
- Toothpaste and toothbrush.
- A comb or a hairbrush.
- Sanitizer to sterilize hands after contact with hospital surfaces such as door knobs. It will protect your elderly parent from contracting nosocomial infections.
- Bathing soap and tissue paper.
The hospital keeps on moving patients from one ward to another. So, the bag you choose should bear your senior’s initials and have a tight zip for security purposes.
2. Prepare a List of Your Parent’s Medication
Failing health necessitates a senior to be under prescription or over-the-counter medication. Though these drugs can be updated and prescribed by a physician and recorded in a patient’s medical records, there is no universal medical record system.
So, during admission, the hospital will ask for all medicines your parent uses. It can be hard to remember all of them off the top of your head, especially in such a stressful situation. Preparing a list ahead of time ensures you provide comprehensive information without errors.
The list should include:
- Name of the drug (prescription and over-the-counter).
- Dosage or frequency of use, for example, two times a day.
- The duration they’ve been using each drug.
Preparing this list helps to prevent:
- Medical duplication. Medical duplication occurs when a patient takes two or more different drugs from the same class. If the physician is unaware of the drugs your senior is taking, they might unknowingly prescribe similar ones leading to a medical emergency.
- Medical dosage errors. A high accumulation of medicines in the body is toxic and can lead to health complications. Having a medical list helps physicians to regulate your senior’s dosage at an acceptable level.
- Adverse medical interaction. Having a list saves physicians from mixing non-compatible drugs.
3. Gather Historical Medical Records
Historical medical records are crucial in ensuring your aging parent receives quality care. The ideal process is to maintain some sort of record system as you go along to ensure this information is readily available when you need it. It is the first tool doctors use to arrive at a diagnosis or recommend further testing.
A medical record should include details such as:
- List of chronic diseases. It should include conditions your senior currently sees a doctor for and the diagnosis date for each.
- Laboratory results. These include blood and urine tests from the past one or two years. Comparing the results from different dates can help determine a health trend.
- Emergency and hospital narrative reports. These are the notes that physicians prepare for other physicians when admitting a patient to the hospital.
- A list of involved clinicians. Knowing why your loved one saw a specific specialist can help a physician discover underlying problems.
- Clinical visit notes. Bring any notes dating back one year from the primary care doctor.
4. Pack Necessary Legal Paperwork
Never underestimate the importance of legal documents when admitting your senior to a hospital. Failing to carry them can delay the admission process and put the health of your loved one at more risk. You should ensure you pack the following documents:
- An identification card or passport. It helps doctors to confirm your senior’s identity to prevent insurance fraud.
- Insurance cards. Health insurance cards give doctors certainty of receiving payment. They also reveal the means the hospital will receive compensation. Is it through a private insurer, Medicaid, or Medicare?
- Financial and medical Power of Attorney. This document is consent from your senior, giving you or someone else the power to act on their behalf in case of incapacitation. Without it, you cannot control your parent’s financial and health decisions.
- Do Not Resuscitate Order. It expresses if your senior wants to be resuscitated or not if their heart stops beating.
5. Choose an Ideal Hospital
All hospitals are not equal. They differ in quality of services, expertise, and specialization. Whatever hospital you choose, you need a guarantee that your parent will receive medical attention immediately and the best care you can afford.
To help you choose an ideal hospital that meets your senior’s needs, you should do the following:
- Consult your parent’s primary caregiver. Discuss your parent’s condition with their primary caregiver and have them recommend a hospital with enough staffing, medical safety, coordinated care, and safety measures to curb nosocomial infections.
- Consider your finances. You should go to a hospital within your means to pay by checking your senior’s insurance coverage. See if you need Medicare or Medicaid preauthorization before hospital admission and if your chosen hospital accepts this payment method.
- Compare different hospitals based on your senior’s needs and finances. Research online to gather more details about the hospitals you’re considering, and consult with a family member to settle on the best depending on the convenient location and flexibility of visiting hours.
6. Decide on the Means of Transportation
After getting all the documents ready and selecting which hospital to go to, the next thing is to decide on the appropriate means of transportation depending on your parent’s health condition. You can call an ambulance or use private means.
If the situation is dire and waiting for an ambulance can cost their lives, you should use private means. For example, if your parent is in acute pain, bleeding severely from a fall, and unconscious.
You should then call the Emergency Medical Service (EMS) to have the operator connect you to the hospital you’re headed to or report the case on your behalf. You should disclose all essential details to help the hospital prepare to administer treatment as soon as you arrive.
Before setting out, it’s also crucial to take a minute or two to determine the shortest route to the emergency room. A GPS-enabled smartphone in this situation would go a long way in updating you about traffic and obstructions that can slow you down.
Finally, the vehicle you choose should:
- Be large enough to help in loading and offloading the patient fast.
- Have enough fuel to get you to the hospital.
7. Get Them to the Emergency Room
The emergency room can be confusing and stressful. Mostly you’ll find a long line of other emergency cases. And sadly, the system ensures every physician in the room is preoccupied. So, arriving in an ambulance doesn’t mean your senior will receive immediate medical attention.
Once you arrive, a triage nurse will attend to your senior to take the medical history and do a brief medical examination to determine the severity of their condition. Only patients with the most critical conditions receive treatment immediately. They use the following order:
- Level 1 patients who need life-saving intervention such as resuscitation
- Level 2 – Emergency
- Level 3 – Urgent
- Level 4 – Semi-urgent
- Level 5 – Non-urgent
Should your senior’s condition worsen while you wait, you should inform the triage nurse to send an emergency specialist.
Tips To Guide You When Giving a Medical History
Though you’ll provide medical records and a list of medications, the physician will also require your parent or you to explain the health situation verbally. The nurses take word of mouth seriously and, in most cases, can reach a diagnosis using it.
To give an accurate medical history, you should:
- Start with the most pressing problem and symptoms, including when they started.
- Disclose all the medications your senior uses, including supplements and painkillers.
- Give details of past hospitalization and illnesses.
- Tell nothing but the truth. You should not give fake symptoms to get fast in line. It’ll only waste everyone’s time.
8. Registration
The purpose of patient registration is to get your senior’s information is to get their information in the hospital’s system. It helps the hospital to maintain efficient health records and to give a patient identification number that can help access a patient’s data effortlessly.
The patient registration form is usually a printed document, but due to technological evolution, some hospitals can ask you to fill it out online. Nonetheless, whichever manner you fill out this document does not diminish its importance.
You provide the following information in the patient registration form:
- Demographic information, including name, gender, and age. The details you give in this section should correspond with those in insurance and legal documents. Otherwise, the insurance companies will fail to pay.
- Updated location address in case your senior has relocated.
- Health insurance details.
- Name of the guardian and relationship.
- Contact details during emergencies.
9. Take Them to the Ward
The next thing that follows after filling out the form is moving the patient to their room. You can opt for semi-private rooms, which accommodate two patients, or private spaces where your parent will stay alone.
If you opt for the private room, you must be ready to pay a portion of the bill because most insurance companies cover semi-private room expenses.
Once you get into the room, the nurse taking care of your senior will come to take medical details and give you the room orientation. They’ll show you where the bathroom is, explain how to change the bed height, and use the call button, bedside telephone, and television. However, the doctor may limit bathroom use if the patient’s condition is unstable.
You’ll also receive bedsheets, blankets, hospital gowns, and towels. If you’re uncomfortable using some hospital items, you can request the nurse to allow you to use what you carried.
If your senior’s condition is highly critical, they’ll go to the intensive care unit, where regulations are strict. The hospital allows a maximum of two people to visit the patient for a few minutes. Once your senior’s health improves, they’ll move to a room with less rigid visiting regulations.
10. Establish Open Communication With Hospital Staff
Before admission, things might be a little hectic and you might be unsure who to ask questions to and what to ask. But once you settle in, you get to know the case manager, primary physician, and charge nurse.
Getting an audience with the busy primary physician might be challenging, but you can request a brief meeting. Having all your questions ready before the meeting can help you optimize the opportunity of getting all answers you need.
After that, you can get answers to emerging questions from the charge nurse in charge of the patient’s day-to-day care.
11. Follow-Up
Following up on your parent’s health progress is crucial in ensuring they have a good hospital experience. You’ll be their advocate to the nurse if something is not okay and be their source of moral and emotional support. You should:
- Visit them daily.
- Bring them food to supplement what the hospital gives.
- Bath and groom them.
- Decide where they’ll stay after recovery.
Final Thoughts
The hospital admission process can be long and exhausting. But, you should try to maintain a calm demeanor to ensure you:
- Pack the necessary documents.
- Transport your senior to the hospital safely.
- Provide accurate and relevant information.
- Fill out the patient registration form accurately.
Smart assistants can tremendously help the elderly with doing their daily tasks. For example, Alexa can be used as a medical alert. Read my guide to learn how. Can You Use Alexa as a Medical Alert for Elders?
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