This is a descriptive study about the readmissions of elderly patients in a general hospital located in the city of Marília, São Paulo, Brazil, in 1996 and 1997. OBJECTIVES: characterizing the readmission profile with respect to the following variables: gender, age, marital status, origin, profession, main and secondary diagnoses, time of hospitalization, type of discharge, financing source, type of procedure and interval between hospitalizations; analyzing the nursing notes in the patients' records about health conditions at the time of admission and discharge. A database about admissions was compiled by using the Epi-Info 6 software. The research population consisted of two hundred sixty-two elderly patients (53.8% of whom were female), who presented 502 readmissions; 32.8% of these occurred once and 55.9% took place in less than 60 days. The patients' mean age was 73.2 years and the average time of hospitalization was 5.49 days. Chronic respiratory diseases predominated and 55.8% of the readmitted patients presented a secondary diagnosis. The content analysis of the notes identified the nursing routine and revealed only some of the aspects concerning the elderly persons' conditions at the time of admission and discharge.
patient readmission; elderly; nursing
