Discharge teaching is usually not delivered in a systematic or consistenly way, nor by relying on a particular intervention model.

Receiving tailored discharge teaching by nurses during hospital stay.

Nurses will provide multimorbid seniors inpatients with teaching related to self-management to prepare them to be discharged home. The teaching delivery will be tailored to patients' activation level and priorities. The intervention begins by determining the level of activation at which patients are and identifying priorities to address related to patients' life situation. A Discharge Teaching Guide will be used by nurses to deliver the teaching and includes six domains of self-management. For each domain, nurses first report whether a priority has been identified and what intervention they have proposed to address it. Then for each domain, teaching objectives are described and differ according to the level of patient activation. These six domains of self-management are found in the patient-oriented discharge summary, which is a document for the patient that summarizes what has been addressed in discharge teaching.

The patient activation measure (PAM) is a 13-item self-report questionnaire to measure patient activation level. Stages of activation are distributed as follows in the PAM items: items 1-2: believing an active role is important; items 3-8: having confidence and knowledge to take action; items 9-11: taking action; and items 12-13: continuing healthy behaviors under stress. PAM raw score can be calculated by adding all of the responses to the 13 questions. This score is then converted into an activation score ranging from 0 = no activation to 100 = high activation using a calibration table. Psychometric properties of the PAM in hospitalized multimorbid patients showed a satisfying reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.88) and a content validity index of 0.91.

The Health Confidence Score (HCS) is an easy-to-obtain proxy measure for the patient activation construct. The HCS is a short measure (4-items) of patients' confidence to manage their health and engage with healthcare providers. Four dimensions are explored: Knowledge, Self-management, Access to help, Shared decision-making. Items have four response options (3 = strongly agree, 2 = agree, 1 = neutral, 0 = disagree). Scores are reported for each item and the higher they are, the higher the confidence is. A summary score is calculated with a 13-point scale by adding the individual items scores, with a range from 0 (4×disagree) to the ceiling 12 (4×strongly agree). This instrument has good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.82) and construct validity.