Assessing the need for a medical respite: perceptions of service providers and homeless persons.

For homeless persons, posthospitalization care is increasingly provided in formal medical respite programs, and their success is now reported in the literature. However, there is a dearth of literature on posthospitalization transitional care for homeless persons in the absence of a respite program. Through this formative study, we sought to understand the process of securing posthospitalization care in the absence of a formal homeless medical respite. Results demonstrated a de facto patchwork respite process that has emerged. We describe both human and monetary costs associated with patchwork respite and demonstrate opportunities for improvement in homeless health care transitions.