The discharge should be planned far in advance of leaving the hospital. Your child's health care provider should arrange for a follow-up visit soon after the discharge date.

Preparing for Home

Oral corticosteroids are likely to be continued for a few more days — until the inflammation is reduced. Quick-relief medications can be continued, roughly at the rate of one dose every four hours. Your child should also continue with his long-term controller medication.

Also during this period, it is important that your child avoid triggers such as tobacco smoke, wood smoke, or perfumes because his airways are inflamed and sore.

Following a severe flare-up and time spent at the hospital, your child should be encouraged to rest and avoid physical activity for a short time. You and your provider should discuss when he should return to school or daycare.

Discharge Summaries

At the time of discharge, you may want to request a discharge summary that you could carry to your first post-discharge visit to your child's health care provider.

A study from Emory University on discharge summaries found that primary care providers often did not receive adequate patient information from hospital-based health care providers following a hospital discharge. These discharge summaries often lacked important information such as diagnostic test results, treatments provided, discharge medications, test results pending at discharge, patient or family counselling, or follow-up plans, the researchers said.

However, the discharge summary will not be dictated or completed until the child has left the hospital, so requesting it before leaving is not reasonable. Asking for a written summary of tests performed and treatments given as well as discharge medications is a reasonable request, and many hospitals do this routinely. You can also request that a copy of the discharge summary be sent to you when it is completed.

Someday, computerized electronic records transmitted from the hospitals to the primary care providers could address this need — when the technology becomes more common and privacy/safety issues can be assured. But for now, the researchers suggested creating computer-generated discharge summaries on paper that patients, acting as couriers, could deliver to their health care providers. This could vastly shorten the delivery time of discharge communications.