The days right after a hospital discharge are riskier than most families realise, and busier than most professionals have time to explain in full. We’ve put together a two-part checklist — what to sort out before leaving hospital, and what to watch for over the first few weeks at home — covering the things that most commonly go wrong, and what actually helps.
Download the printable checklist (PDF) to keep on hand or hand straight to a family, or read the summary below.
Why the first weeks at home carry real risk
This isn’t scare-mongering… it’s well documented. A systematic review of medication safety after hospital discharge found that roughly half of adult and elderly patients experience a medication error or discrepancy in the weeks after leaving hospital, and around one in five experience an adverse drug event. Those numbers are genuinely high, and worth taking seriously. Older adults are also known to fall more often in the first month after a hospital stay than they would otherwise, often linked to deconditioning, new medications, or an unmodified home environment. And the closest thing to a global consensus on discharge planning — a review of 33 trials by the Cochrane Collaboration, one of the most trusted bodies in evidence-based medicine — found that a personalised discharge plan reliably lowers the chances of an older patient ending up back in hospital, though the effect here is modest rather than dramatic: roughly an 11% reduction in readmission risk, on average. Real risks, and a reliable but incremental way to reduce them — that’s exactly why a short, boring checklist is worth the two minutes it takes to go through.
The checklist
Medications
- Go through the discharge medication list line by line with the family before they leave — what changed, what stopped, what’s new.
- Flag if a family member will need to help manage dosing or timing, especially where the regimen changed during admission.
- Make sure they know who to call with a medication question in the first week — GP, pharmacist, or the discharging team.
Wound and surgical site (where relevant)
- Confirm before discharge who changes the dressing at home, and how often.
- Make sure wound-care supplies are provided or prescribed, not left for the family to track down.
- Know what infection looks like — redness, swelling, warmth, or new discharge — so it’s caught early rather than at the next appointment.
Falls and home safety
- If mobility, balance, or strength was affected by the admission, a basic home safety check matters before day one: loose rugs, poor lighting on stairs, a bathroom without grab rails.
- Confirm any equipment (walker, raised toilet seat, shower chair) is actually in the home and set up, not just ordered.
- Where formal input is warranted, an OT home visit remains the gold standard — this checklist doesn’t replace that.
Follow-up care
- Confirm the next appointment is booked before discharge, not left for the family to arrange from home.
- Write down, in plain language, what symptoms should trigger a call to the GP versus a trip back to hospital.
- Write down emergency numbers too — an ambulance number and an after-hours GP line — so nobody’s searching for them in a crisis.
Having someone consistently there
- The single biggest gap we see: a family assumes someone will “check in,” and nobody is specifically responsible for it. A consistent person in the home — a family member or a placed caregiver — is often what catches a missed dose, a fall risk, or a wound that isn’t healing well, simply by being present enough to notice. Worth naming a backup too, in case that person is unavailable.
Where Agapé fits in, if a family needs it
We’re not a clinical service, and this checklist isn’t a substitute for your own discharge protocol or a nursing assessment. What we do is place a vetted, directly-employed caregiver into a home for the non-clinical parts of recovery — daily support, mobility assistance, companionship, and consistent presence — so a family isn’t trying to piece together informal help at the exact moment they’re least equipped to. If a family you’re discharging needs a professional needs assessment first, we work with an independent registered nurse consultant who handles that as a separate service.
If you’d like to talk through how a referral works in practice, get in touch. Or download the printable checklist to keep at your practice or ward.
Sources
- Parekh et al., Prevalence and Nature of Medication Errors and Medication-Related Harm Following Discharge from Hospital to Community Settings: A Systematic Review, Drug Safety (2020)
- Gonçalves-Bradley et al., Discharge planning from hospital, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (2022)
- CDC STEADI, Older Adult Fall Prevention — Inpatient Care
