According to Skilled Nursing News, the average length of stay in skilled nursing is between 20 and 38 days, depending on whether you have a traditional Medicare plan or a Medicare Advantage plan. For those who use Medicare, the current requirement to go to a skilled nursing facility is a three-night hospital stay. According to the National Assisted Living Center, 59% of all assisted living residents will eventually move to a skilled nursing facility. Overall, the average stay in a nursing home is 835 days, according to the National Council for Care Planning.
For residents who have been discharged, including those who received short-term rehabilitation care, the average stay in a nursing home is 270 days or 8.9 months. The average length of stay in a subacute nursing home is 10-11 days. However, there will be no two patients who have the same needs and the length of stay may vary depending on the situation. Whether they are recovering from injury, surgery or illness, treatment programs are adjusted to fit the patient's personal needs.
We recently analyzed the use of SNF for major joint replacement (DRG 470), mainly hips and knees. The average SNF stay was 15.5 days, complemented by a low readmission rate (5.7%). These data led us to a deeper analysis, in which we identified that nearly 25 percent of patients who recovered in an SNF did not have comorbid conditions, making them the top candidates for healing at home, reducing costs and allowing patients to heal more quickly. The length of stay was considered short if it was less than 6 months, the prognostic requirement for the Medicare hospice benefit.
The study authors used data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to describe the length of stay of older adults residing in nursing homes at the end of life. However, relatives of subjects are unlikely to have counted readmission to the nursing home after hospitalization as a new start date. In the exit interviews, caregivers of the deceased were asked to identify the month and year in which the deceased moved to the nursing home. There are several types of long-term care options to fit a variety of needs, including nursing homes, assisted living facilities, rest homes, and other elderly care services.
Choosing the right nursing facility requires a lot of consideration, so it's normal to have a lot of questions before making that decision. We use the date of entry to the nursing home and the date of death to calculate the length of stay in months. A 2002 study by Miller and colleagues found that 51% of nursing home residents who were enrolled in hospice (N%3D2,64) received daily pain relievers, compared with 33% of non-hospice residents (N%3D7,92). In conclusion, the short periods of nursing home stays among deceased older adults highlight the importance of health care providers discussing and addressing advance care planning needs with patients and their families, including hospice and palliative care options, little after admission to the nursing home.
In addition to the issue of withdrawal bias, this study may not accurately present the length of stay of nursing home residents who were transferred to hospital due to acute illness and then subsequently readmitted. A sensitivity analysis was performed to determine how excluded subjects differ from subjects in the final sample with respect to demographic characteristics and length of stay in the nursing home before death. There is growing support for the idea that advance care planning discussions, including hospice and palliative care options, should take place soon after admission and should be regularly rediscussed with nursing home residents and their families. .
