Assessment of Community-Based Home Health Programs among Children with Chronic Disease in Tertiary Care Center, Riyadh

Background: Home health care (HHC) is a newly developed model of care that helps patients to be treated at their home and avoid hospital admission with the aim of promoting, maintaining or restoring health as part of their comprehensive services. Objective: To assess the effectiveness of HHC in reducing the days of admissions and ED visits for children with chronic diseases. Materials and methods: A cross-sectional study held at a tertiary care center. Consecutive sampling technique was used to review all patients' files registered for HHC program from 2016 to 2018. Continuous variables were reported as mean and standard deviation, whereas categorical were reported as percentages and frequencies. Wilcoxon rank test was used to assess differences before and after enrolment in the HHC program. SPSS V22.0 was used for analysis. Results: A total of 92 patients were involved in this study; 57% were males and 44% were females. 42% of them had neuro-developmental diseases. Among all the services provided, nursing care was the most needed service. The total number of days of admission was reduced from 28 +/- 0.6 to 6.75 +/- 0.39 days in 4 months period and from 38.37 +/- 62 to 9.02 +/- 14 days in 6 months period with p-value<0.001. However, the ED visits were not affected by the p-value of 0.19 and 0.33 for both 4 months and 6 months period, respectively. Conclusion: HHC program showed an effective result in reducing the frequency of hospital admission and days of children's admission, yet it had no effect on lowering the ED visits.