- Design
- Single-centre quality improvement report, before and after
- Population
- Inpatients referred for post-acute rehabilitation at a US Veterans Affairs hospital
- Primary outcome
- Mean referral-to-discharge time
- Effect
- 6.89 days (2023) to 4.58 (2024) to 3.35 days (2025)
A San Francisco Veterans Affairs hospital opened a short-stay rehabilitation unit run by hospitalists within its own long-term care facility. Over two years, the time from rehabilitation referral to discharge fell by about half.
The report is descriptive and other changes over the period may have contributed. It is still a useful model in systems where rehabilitation placement is the main reason medically fit patients stay in acute beds.
- Mean referral-to-discharge time fell from 6.9 days to 3.4 days over two years.
- The unit became the fastest and most used rehabilitation destination at the site.
- Identify rehabilitation needs early in the admission, not on the planned discharge day.
- Record why each delayed patient is waiting, so the bottleneck is visible.
Why it matters
Delayed discharge is usually treated as a bed-supply problem; this suggests medical ownership of the post-acute step can move patients without more beds.
Don't overread it
This is a single-site before-and-after report with no control group.
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