For an older person, leaving hospital can mark the end of acute treatment without marking the end of vulnerability. A hip fracture may have been repaired, pneumonia treated or heart failure stabilised, yet the person returning home may be weaker than before admission, taking different medicines, uncertain about mobility and increasingly dependent on relatives who have had little time to prepare.
That transition sits at an important intersection within the Türkiye Aging, Long-Term Care & Community Support Knowledge Hub. Türkiye has a large hospital system, established family medicine infrastructure and nationally organised home health services, but long-term support continues to involve several health, social and family arrangements rather than one integrated pathway. Hospital discharge therefore tests how effectively those parts connect around a person whose needs may have changed during admission.
Türkiye's current home-health framework provides an important bridge. People discharged from hospital can be considered for home health where the hospital physician determines that continuing or time-limited medical care is appropriate at home. National policy also seeks stronger integration between geriatric, palliative and home health services and greater coordination between health and social services for older people.
The strategic opportunity is broader than arranging an earlier hospital exit. Strong transitional care should convert clinical recovery into sustainable recovery at home or in another appropriate setting. That means understanding function, medication, rehabilitation, family capacity, housing and social support before the person crosses the hospital door.
Discharge is a transition of responsibility, not simply a hospital event
Hospitals are designed principally to diagnose, stabilise and treat acute illness. Their responsibility for safe discharge is substantial, but the conditions determining what happens next extend beyond the hospital.
An older person may be medically fit to leave an acute bed while remaining unable to prepare food, climb stairs or manage medicines independently. A relative may be willing to help but unable to provide personal care throughout the day. A person who previously walked independently may now require rehabilitation before returning to their previous level of function.
The distinction matters because discharge criteria and sustainable independence are not the same thing.
Effective hospital discharge and transitional care therefore need to address three overlapping questions: whether acute hospital treatment can safely end, what continuing health care is required and what practical support the person needs to live outside hospital.
Where those questions are considered separately, responsibility can shift faster than capability. The hospital completes its treatment, the family receives the person home and the remaining needs become visible only after the transition has occurred.
For younger people recovering from uncomplicated illness, that gap may be manageable. For an older person with frailty, multimorbidity, cognitive impairment or substantial functional loss, it can determine whether recovery continues or begins to unravel.
Türkiye already has important components of a transitional pathway
Türkiye does not begin from an absence of community health infrastructure. Family physicians provide continuing primary care, home health services can deliver specified health interventions outside conventional facilities, and hospitals provide specialist and acute care. Rehabilitation and palliative services add further capability, while the Ministry of Family and Social Services, municipalities, families and other organisations contribute different forms of social and practical support.
The Twelfth Development Plan 2024–2028 sets a significant policy direction. It calls for a model combining health and social services in elderly care, stronger preventive and therapeutic services for older people, increased geriatric and palliative-care capacity and integration of those services with home health care.
That policy direction is important because hospital discharge exposes precisely the interfaces that an integrated model needs to manage.
Türkiye's home-health arrangements are particularly relevant. Current Ministry of Health rules identify several groups who can fall within the service, including people whose physician determines at hospital discharge that continuing medical care should be provided at home and people requiring time-limited medical care for up to 30 days after discharge, with extension possible where clinically necessary.
Priority consideration also includes people with conditions such as heart failure, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, multimorbidity and people requiring medical care following certain fractures or amputation.
This creates a formal health-service bridge between hospital and home. The wider challenge is ensuring that clinical home care connects with everything else required for recovery.
Functional change should shape discharge planning
An older person's diagnosis does not tell the discharge team whether they can manage at home.
Two people treated successfully for the same condition may leave hospital with very different levels of independence. One may return to normal activity quickly. Another may have lost strength after bed rest, become fearful of falling, require help transferring or no longer be able to manage meals and medication.
That is why functional ability needs to be visible alongside medical stability.
A proportionate discharge assessment may need to understand mobility, transfers, personal care, cognition, nutrition, continence, communication, medication management and the physical environment to which the person is returning. It should also establish what the person could do before admission, because new dependency may represent a recoverable decline rather than a permanent condition.
This connects discharge planning with restorative and independence-focused care. The aim is not simply to compensate for every loss of ability. Where recovery is realistic, the pathway should help the person regain function.
That can alter long-term demand. A person discharged with appropriate rehabilitation and graded support may regain independence that would otherwise have been replaced by continuing family or formal care.
Operational scenario: a successful operation creates a new care need
A 79-year-old woman in İstanbul is admitted after a fall and undergoes surgery for a hip fracture. Before the fall she lived with her husband, managed personal care independently and walked outside with a stick. Her operation is successful and acute treatment progresses as expected.
By the time discharge is being considered, however, she requires assistance to transfer and is not confident walking without another person nearby. Her husband is 82 and has his own mobility limitations.
A discharge process focused predominantly on the repaired fracture could conclude that hospital treatment is complete. A transition-focused process asks what has changed between admission and discharge.
The clinical plan identifies continuing medical requirements and whether home health is appropriate. Rehabilitation needs are explicit. Medication changes are reconciled and explained. The home situation is considered, including whether the woman can reach essential parts of the property safely and what assistance her husband can realistically provide.
The family's willingness to help is important, but willingness is not treated as evidence of unlimited capacity.
Follow-up also has a purpose. If mobility improves, support can reduce. If she remains substantially dependent, the pathway needs reassessment rather than allowing temporary arrangements to become permanent by default.
The scenario illustrates why discharge quality cannot be measured only by whether a person left hospital on the planned date. The stronger outcome is whether treatment translated into safe recovery and sustainable life outside hospital.
Home health provides a clinical bridge but not the whole bridge
Türkiye's Evde Sağlık Hizmetleri, or home health services, are an important component of post-discharge continuity. Ministry arrangements allow examination, investigation, treatment, medical care and rehabilitation to be delivered in the home for people meeting relevant criteria.
The service is particularly significant for people who cannot easily return to conventional facilities because of age, dependency or health status.
Yet home health should not be confused with a comprehensive long-term social-care service.
A home-health professional may monitor a wound, provide clinical follow-up or support rehabilitation, while the person still requires help with washing, food preparation, supervision or everyday household tasks. Those practical needs may be met by family, social support or other services rather than the health team.
The distinction is operationally important.
A discharge plan can look complete because a home-health referral has been made while substantial non-medical needs remain unresolved.
The strongest pathway therefore identifies which needs belong to health services, which require social or community support and which the person and family have chosen and are realistically able to manage themselves.
This is part of the broader challenge of coordination across health and social care. Integration does not require every need to be delivered by one organisation. It requires the separate contributions to fit together.
Medication reconciliation is a transition control, not an administrative detail
Hospital admission frequently changes medication. New drugs may be started, previous medicines stopped or doses altered. For an older person taking several medicines, the transition home can therefore create a significant safety risk.
The problem is not confined to whether the discharge prescription is technically correct.
The person or family needs to understand what changed. The professional providing continuing care needs an accurate current list. Duplicate medicines stored at home may need attention. Cognitive impairment, visual problems or limited health literacy may make self-management difficult even when instructions are available.
This makes medication management and polypharmacy a core transitional-care issue for an ageing population.
Medication reconciliation should establish a reliable account of what the person should now take, how that differs from the pre-admission regimen and who will respond if side effects, confusion or practical problems emerge.
Primary care has an important role after discharge because the family physician may continue managing chronic conditions long after the hospital episode has ended. Home-health professionals may also observe whether medicines are actually being managed as intended.
Where several specialists remain involved, the risk is not simply error but treatment burden. An older person can leave hospital with a clinically defensible plan that becomes extremely difficult to implement alongside rehabilitation, appointments and everyday life.
Transitional care therefore needs to make the medication plan safe in practice, not only correct on paper.
Information needs to travel before responsibility does
A person can physically arrive home faster than their information reaches the professionals expected to support them.
Türkiye's substantial digital-health infrastructure creates an important foundation for continuity, but transitional care still depends on what information is available, how quickly it is available and whether somebody acts on it.
The receiving professional needs more than the fact that a hospital admission occurred. Depending on the circumstances, relevant information may include the diagnosis and treatment, medication changes, outstanding investigations, mobility or rehabilitation needs, warning signs, planned follow-up and any continuing medical-care requirements.
For complex older people, social and functional information can be equally important.
A discharge summary saying that an 84-year-old is medically stable does not reveal that she lives alone on the third floor, has become unable to climb stairs or that her daughter can visit only twice each week.
Not every professional needs unrestricted access to every detail. Privacy, consent and appropriate information governance remain essential. The objective is effective information exchange across the care pathway, not indiscriminate data sharing.
Organizations examining similar transition risks can use the Digital Transformation, AI and Cybersecurity Readiness Assessment to structure questions about interoperability, workforce capability, information governance and digital risk. It is not a Türkiye-specific clinical standard, but it can help separate technical connectivity from genuine operational readiness.
Family members often become the unofficial transition workforce
In Türkiye, family caregiving remains a major component of support for older people. Hospital discharge can rapidly increase that responsibility.
A relative may collect the person from hospital, obtain medicines, arrange follow-up, prepare meals, assist with mobility and interpret instructions from several professionals. If formal support is fragmented, the family member becomes the person who connects the pathway.
That contribution can be valuable and entirely consistent with the preferences of the older person and family. It should not be assumed to be unlimited.
A daughter who says she will help her father after discharge may mean that she can visit each evening. The discharge team may interpret the same statement as meaning that continuous support is available. A spouse may agree to provide assistance without understanding the physical demands of transfers or personal care.
Good discharge planning therefore distinguishes family involvement from family capacity.
Where substantial informal support is necessary for the plan to work, the person providing it needs enough information to understand the role and an opportunity to explain what is realistically sustainable.
This does not require hospitals to resolve every long-term caregiver issue before discharge. It does require them to avoid constructing a transition around support that does not actually exist.
Operational scenario: the daughter becomes the discharge plan
An 86-year-old man in İzmir is admitted with pneumonia. He has mild cognitive impairment and previously lived alone, with his daughter visiting most evenings. During admission he becomes deconditioned and needs more prompting with medication and meals.
His daughter is told that he can return home and says that she will help. She assumes this means continuing her previous evening visits. The hospital team assumes that family supervision will cover his increased needs.
Within days, he misses medication, eats poorly and becomes increasingly weak. His daughter begins visiting before and after work and sleeping at his home several nights each week.
The problem is not that the family was unwilling. The transition relied on an undefined assumption.
A stronger process makes the change in function explicit before discharge. The daughter is asked what support she can actually provide. Continuing health needs are identified, home-health eligibility is considered where appropriate, and any need for wider social support is made visible rather than silently transferred to the household.
The father's own preferences remain central. He may strongly wish to return home, and that preference should shape planning. But respecting choice requires an honest understanding of what makes that choice sustainable.
If similar discharges repeatedly depend on escalating unpaid care, that pattern should also become visible to service planners. Individual family resilience should not conceal a structural transition gap.
Rehabilitation determines whether temporary decline becomes lasting dependency
Hospitalisation itself can reduce function, particularly for frail older people. Acute illness, bed rest, disrupted routines and reduced activity can leave somebody weaker even after the original medical problem has improved.
That makes rehabilitation central to transitional care.
Türkiye's Twelfth Development Plan specifically links increased geriatric and palliative-care capacity with home health and seeks stronger health services for active ageing. The direction is important because rehabilitation cannot be confined conceptually to a specialist institution. Recovery continues across hospital, home and community settings.
The practical question at discharge is what the person is capable of recovering.
Someone who needs assistance with dressing immediately after a stroke may require long-term support, but they may also regain substantial function through appropriate rehabilitation. If the first response is simply to establish permanent assistance, the pathway can inadvertently institutionalise temporary dependency.
Conversely, unrealistic expectations of recovery can leave a person without enough support.
Strong transitional care therefore combines rehabilitation potential with immediate safety. It provides enough support for the present while continuing to work towards greater independence where that is realistic.
This requires coordination between medical treatment and functional goals. A person should not experience rehabilitation as an optional addition after the “real” hospital care has ended.
For older people, regaining the ability to transfer, walk to the bathroom or prepare a simple meal may be as consequential to long-term wellbeing as the clinical resolution of the condition that caused admission.
Primary care should receive the person, not rediscover the episode
Article 12 in this Türkiye series examined primary care as a platform for community-level coordination. Hospital discharge is one of the points at which that role becomes tangible.
The family physician may have known the person before admission and may continue caring for them for years afterwards. That longitudinal relationship makes primary care important for detecting whether the expected recovery actually occurs.
The receiving team needs timely information about what happened, what changed and what follow-up is required. Just as importantly, it needs a clear route back to specialist or hospital care where deterioration or unresolved clinical questions emerge.
A strong transition therefore avoids forcing primary care to reconstruct the hospital episode from the patient or family.
Post-discharge follow-up can then concentrate on the issues that matter: symptom stability, medication, nutrition, function, cognition, rehabilitation progress and whether the care arrangement remains workable.
This creates a genuine closed-loop follow-up pathway. Information does not simply leave the hospital; responsibility is received, acted upon and connected back to specialist services when necessary.
The objective is not to generate another appointment automatically for every discharged person. Follow-up intensity should reflect risk and need.
A younger independent patient after a straightforward procedure requires a different pathway from an 88-year-old with heart failure, frailty, five medication changes and a spouse who is also unwell.
Operational scenario: thirty days of medical support are not necessarily thirty days of recovery
A 76-year-old man in Konya is discharged after an exacerbation of heart failure. His hospital physician considers time-limited home medical care appropriate after discharge. The arrangement creates an important bridge: his clinical status can be monitored without requiring repeated travel to hospital.
During home visits, however, it becomes apparent that his recovery is affected by more than heart failure. He is weak, has difficulty preparing meals and is anxious about walking after becoming dizzy before admission. His wife manages most household tasks but has arthritis.
The home-health intervention can address defined medical needs, but those observations raise wider questions.
Primary care needs visibility of the continuing clinical plan. Functional recovery needs review. The couple may require information about relevant social or community support. Medication needs to remain understandable as treatment changes.
Most importantly, the end of a time-limited health intervention should not automatically be interpreted as the end of need.
If the man's clinical condition stabilises but substantial functional dependency remains, the next stage should be identified before the temporary bridge closes.
This is where transition governance matters. Service duration and human recovery do not necessarily follow the same timetable. The pathway needs a review point capable of asking whether the person can now manage, requires a different service or needs escalation.
The Positive Risk Enablement Planner can help organisations examining comparable situations structure decisions around autonomy, safety and proportionate support. It does not determine eligibility in Türkiye, but its underlying discipline is useful when discharge choices involve both personal preference and continuing risk.
Residential care should not become the default solution to a difficult discharge
Some older people leaving hospital will require residential care. Where needs are substantial and home is no longer a safe or sustainable option, residential provision can be an appropriate part of the continuum.
But hospital pressure can distort decision-making if the immediate need to free an acute bed becomes confused with a long-term decision about where somebody should live.
An older person who was independent before admission may appear highly dependent during early recovery. Moving directly into long-term residential provision without sufficient consideration of rehabilitation potential can turn an acute episode into a permanent change of living arrangement.
Equally, insisting on return home where adequate support cannot be arranged can create unacceptable risk.
The decision therefore requires more than a binary choice between hospital and home.
Türkiye's developing continuum needs sufficient intermediate capability to support recovery, reassessment and proportionate escalation. That can include home health, rehabilitation, family support, community provision and, where appropriate, residential care.
This connects with wider residential-care interfaces and transitions. The quality of a system is partly reflected in whether placement decisions are driven by the person's longer-term needs rather than the absence of another immediate option.
Discharge pathways need to recognise dementia and cognitive change
Cognitive impairment makes transitions more complex even where the reason for hospital admission is unrelated to dementia.
A person who coped with familiar routines before admission may become disorientated in hospital. Delirium can further complicate assessment. Medication instructions, follow-up arrangements and changes in function may be difficult for the person to understand or remember.
The discharge process therefore needs to distinguish pre-existing cognitive impairment, acute confusion and any new concern requiring further assessment.
Family information can be particularly valuable because relatives may understand the person's baseline function and behaviour better than professionals meeting them during an acute admission.
At the same time, cognitive impairment should not erase the person's voice.
Communication should be adapted to ability, and decisions about living arrangements and support should preserve autonomy as far as possible. Family involvement is important, but it should not automatically substitute for the older person's own preferences.
Article 10 in this series examines Türkiye's dementia pathways in depth. Within transitional care, the essential issue is continuity: cognitive vulnerability increases the importance of familiar support, clear information, medication safety and follow-up after the disruption of hospitalisation.
Workforce design determines whether coordination exists beyond the discharge document
Good transitional care requires people as well as protocols.
Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists, rehabilitation professionals, family physicians, home-health teams and social-service staff may all contribute at different stages. Families often add substantial unpaid support.
The challenge is not that every discharge requires all of these roles. It is that the system needs enough capability to assemble the right combination when complexity increases.
Hospital professionals need to recognise functional and social risks rather than focusing solely on the acute diagnosis. Community professionals need enough information to receive responsibility. Home-health teams need workable routes for escalating issues that extend beyond their remit.
As Türkiye's older population grows, these transition functions will also affect workforce and care-team design.
Some coordination can be improved through better digital processes and clearer roles rather than adding staff to every transition. But coordination still consumes professional time. Telephone calls, family discussions, medication reconciliation, functional assessment and cross-service referral do not happen simply because a policy says services should integrate.
Workforce planning therefore needs to recognise coordination as productive care activity rather than invisible administration.
Organizations examining future capacity can use the Predictive Workforce Risk Module to explore how staffing pressures may affect continuity and service stability. The tool is not a Türkiye workforce model, but it provides a structured way to examine how workforce risk can translate into pathway risk.
Operational scenario: repeated readmission reveals a transition problem
An 83-year-old woman with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is admitted twice within three months with respiratory deterioration. Each admission is treated appropriately, and each time she returns to her apartment.
After the second discharge, a wider review shows that she has difficulty using some of her treatment correctly, becomes breathless preparing meals and has reduced activity because she fears another episode. Her son visits at weekends but lives outside the city.
No single failure explains the readmissions.
The clinical condition is chronic. The woman has received hospital treatment. The family is involved. Yet the transition has repeatedly returned her to an environment in which treatment burden and functional limitations remain difficult to manage.
A stronger response treats repeat admission as a signal to reconsider the pathway rather than simply repeat it.
Medication and treatment technique are reviewed. Home-health or other clinical support is considered according to need and eligibility. Primary care receives a clear continuing plan. Functional and nutritional concerns are addressed, and the woman's own priorities are discussed.
At system level, repeated post-discharge hospital use should also become visible as a quality signal. Not every readmission is preventable, and crude targets can encourage unsafe avoidance of necessary hospital care. The useful question is whether recurring patterns reveal unresolved transition needs that could have been managed differently.
This is the distinction between measuring hospital activity and governing avoidable utilisation across a pathway.
Quality measurement should follow the person beyond the hospital door
A hospital can achieve good clinical outcomes while the overall transition remains weak.
Traditional measures such as length of stay, discharge volume and readmission provide useful information, but each can be misleading when viewed alone.
A shorter stay may reflect efficient care or premature discharge. A low readmission rate may indicate successful community support or barriers to returning to hospital. A completed referral says little about whether support actually began.
Transitional-care governance therefore benefits from a balanced evidence set.
Depending on the pathway, useful questions include:
- whether essential discharge information reached the receiving service promptly;
- whether medication changes were reconciled and understood;
- whether planned home-health or rehabilitation support actually commenced;
- whether functional ability improved, remained stable or deteriorated after discharge;
- whether unplanned emergency or hospital use occurred and what contributed to it; and
- whether the older person and family understood the plan and knew where to seek help.
These measures connect process with outcome rather than assuming that one predicts the other.
The Quality Dashboard Builder can help organisations examining similar pathways structure indicators across access, safety, continuity and outcomes. It should not be treated as defining Turkish performance requirements; its value is in translating a complex transition into evidence that leaders can review together.
Regional variation matters because a discharge plan depends on what exists locally
National rules can define eligibility and policy direction, but discharge takes place into a specific community.
The availability of rehabilitation, home health, specialist follow-up, municipal support and family assistance can differ. Geography affects travel. Workforce distribution affects response. Urban areas may have more service options but also high demand and fragmented provider networks. Rural areas may rely on smaller teams covering greater distances.
This means that an identical discharge template cannot guarantee an identical transition.
Hospitals need an accurate understanding of the services into which they are discharging people. A referral to a theoretically available service is not the same as timely practical access.
Persistent local gaps should also become visible above the individual case level.
If one province repeatedly experiences delays in post-discharge rehabilitation, or a district's older residents remain in hospital because appropriate community support cannot be arranged, the issue is a capacity problem as well as a discharge problem.
Türkiye's commitment to more balanced distribution of health personnel and infrastructure is therefore relevant to transitional care. Equity depends not only on national entitlement but on whether the required workforce and services can be reached where people live.
Governance should treat failed transitions as system evidence
The most important governance shift is to stop viewing every difficult discharge as an isolated operational problem.
A single delayed referral may be an exception. Repeated delays suggest a pathway issue. One family misunderstanding medication may require better communication. The same pattern across many discharges may indicate that the discharge process itself is poorly designed.
Learning therefore needs to cross organisational boundaries.
Hospitals can examine what happens after people leave. Primary-care and home-health teams can identify recurring information gaps. Social services can show where referrals arrive without enough context or where families seek help only after arrangements have deteriorated.
Older people and caregivers can reveal problems that formal records miss: contradictory instructions, unclear responsibility, unexpected costs, inaccessible transport or the experience of having to coordinate professionals themselves.
The objective is not to assign blame between sectors. It is to identify where the transition repeatedly loses continuity.
Organizations exploring similar cross-system governance questions can use the Governance Maturity Assessment to examine responsibility, escalation, evidence and organisational learning. The framework does not replace Türkiye's governance arrangements, but its focus on whether decision-makers can see recurring risks is directly relevant to transitional care.
Türkiye can develop discharge into a stronger bridge between acute care and long-term support
Türkiye's policy direction creates a significant opportunity. The Twelfth Development Plan does not treat ageing solely as a hospital-capacity issue; it calls for stronger coordination of health and social services, greater geriatric and palliative capacity and integration with home health.
Transitional care is one of the practical places where that ambition can become visible.
The strongest future model would not require creation of a single national organisation responsible for everything after discharge. It would require clearer interfaces between existing responsibilities.
Hospitals would identify continuing clinical, functional and social risks before discharge. Home health would provide appropriate medical care for eligible people outside hospital. Primary care would maintain longitudinal clinical continuity. Rehabilitation would support recovery of function. Social and community services would address needs outside the health remit. Families would remain partners without automatically becoming the substitute for missing formal support.
Digital infrastructure could reduce information loss, while shared performance intelligence could show where transitions repeatedly result in deterioration, delayed recovery or avoidable hospital use.
The result would be less a new service than a better-governed continuum.
What Türkiye's transition challenge offers internationally
Hospital discharge is a universal health-system challenge, but the institutional response cannot simply be transferred between countries.
Systems with comprehensive publicly funded social care, dedicated post-acute facilities or insurance-based long-term care have different resources and accountability structures from Türkiye. Even within Türkiye, local service availability and family circumstances vary.
The transferable lesson lies in treating discharge as a transfer of capability and responsibility rather than a date.
Every system needs to know what changed during admission, what the person can now do, what remains recoverable, which continuing needs are clinical, what wider support is required and who will notice if the plan does not work.
Türkiye's home-health provisions illustrate another useful principle: hospital-to-home clinical care can create an explicit bridge for people who still require medical support. But health care alone cannot resolve every transition need. A sustainable pathway also depends on rehabilitation, social support, primary care and realistic family capacity.
The comparison therefore highlights a shared challenge rather than an identical policy response. Integration becomes meaningful when the person experiences continuity even though responsibility is distributed across several organisations and people.
Conclusion
Hospital discharge is becoming increasingly important to Türkiye's ageing strategy because more older people will leave acute care with needs that extend beyond the condition for which they were admitted. Medical stability remains essential, but it does not by itself establish whether somebody can manage medicines, regain mobility, prepare food, navigate follow-up or sustain life at home.
Türkiye already has important foundations for a stronger transitional model. Current home-health arrangements explicitly provide routes for continuing and time-limited medical care after hospital discharge, while national policy seeks closer integration between elderly health services, palliative care, home health and social support. The opportunity is to connect those components around the person's recovery rather than allow each service to operate as a separate destination.
That means making functional change visible, reconciling medication, understanding family capacity, linking rehabilitation with discharge, transferring information promptly and ensuring that temporary interventions have a route into longer-term support where needs persist. Governance then needs to examine what happens after people leave hospital, using repeated readmission, failed referrals, delayed recovery and the experiences of families as evidence for pathway improvement.
The central test is straightforward but demanding: discharge should not merely move an older person out of an acute bed. It should transfer them into a coherent next stage of care in which health treatment, recovery, independence and everyday support remain connected. As Türkiye develops a more integrated long-term-care continuum, that transition will be one of the clearest measures of whether national ambition is working in people's lives.