What are the elements of a discharge plan for a child with a spinal cord injury? - Dawn Sheaffer, MSW

We begin discharge planning the minute the child and family walk into the hospital to think about what the resources are that they already have at home—in terms of family support, community support, the educational system, the financial resources, the accessibility resources they might need—and then work towards putting in place the additional pieces that are not already present. It’s very, very individualized. We work with children from all over the country and all over the world, so it’s a very wide-range of needs. It’s being resourceful in conjunction with the family and their community, and thinking about and planning for all of the needs of that child when then get home. It’s done in one of two ways—a lot of it depends upon our sense of how much information a family is ready for at a given time. Maybe pieces of information that are shared throughout the process of the admission and as we’re moving and planning towards discharge, with written information that we then review with the family about the resources that we’re working on putting in place, the connections that they’re making with their community. And then also something more comprehensive is shared with them in writing at the time of discharge that reviews any of the referrals that we’ve made, whether it’s for physical therapy and occupational therapy within the community at home, the connections we’ve made with the child’s school or daycare, and the resources that will be put in place there—the financial resources we might be looking at. So it’s done both throughout the process as well as at the conclusion.