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Discharging is the act that ends a stay and frees the bed for the next patient. Ward Discharges is where every completed stay is then kept, in one place, for as long as you need to look back at it.

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Before you start

Write the discharge summary before you start the discharge, not during it. It is the one part of the stay that a GP, a community nurse or the patient themselves will actually read, and it is the last thing anyone can add to the record while the patient is still yours.

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Discharge a patient

1

Open the patient's ward chart

From Ward admissions, select the occupied bed.
2

Select Discharge

It sits leftmost in the chart header, deliberately away from the primary slot. The Discharge {patient} panel opens.
3

Choose Discharged to

Pick one of the required tiles: Home, Home with care or support, Transferred to another facility, Left against medical advice, Deceased or Other. Choosing Transferred to another facility asks for Transferred to (the receiving facility’s name); choosing Other asks Where to. Both are required.
4

Set the Condition on discharge

Choose Improved, Stable, Unchanged or Deteriorated. Required.
5

Write the Discharge summary

Required. Cover the diagnosis, the treatment given and the course of the stay — this is the one part of the record a GP, a community nurse or the patient themselves will actually read.
6

Add follow-up and medications, if there are any

Follow-up (optional) and its Follow-up date (optional) (today or later), and Discharge medications (optional) — what the patient takes home, kept on the discharge record. All optional.
7

Select Discharge

A confirmation opens — Discharge this patient — naming what happens: the stay ends and the bed becomes available. Select Discharge again to confirm.
You get Patient discharged. The bed empties on the grid and the stay moves to Ward Discharges, along with the attending clinician recorded at the moment of discharge, who discharged the patient, and the treatment team as it stood when the stay ended.
Discharging cannot be undone from the app. It ends the stay, releases the bed to whoever needs it next, and closes the chart to further ordering. If the patient turns out not to be going home, they are admitted again as a new stay — which is a different record from the one you just closed.

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Who can discharge

Owners and managers can always discharge. Beyond that, it is a role your clinic chooses under Settings → Facility → Clinical access — see Facility. Until a clinic makes its own choice, the doctor-class clinical roles (Doctor, Physiotherapist, Psychiatrist, Psychologist, Counselor and the other behavioral-health and social-work roles) can discharge. A person also needs the Discharge a patient permission if your clinic uses Staff permissions to restrict it further.

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When Discharge is disabled

The button stays visible and states its reason rather than disappearing: Offline, an amber banner sits across the top of the chart: “You are offline. Discharge and ordering need a connection — a bed is a shared resource, and an order composed offline would be a draft nobody has confirmed.” Observations and notes keep working. See Working offline.

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What you’re looking at

Ward Discharges opens on the list of completed stays, under the line View complete history of all discharged patients. Find someone with Search for patient, narrow by All dispositions or a specific one beside it, and use View Columns → Toggle columns to change what the table shows. A hospital with no completed stays yet sees No discharged patients available., and a filtered page with nothing on it reads No records found.

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Review a completed stay

1

Open the row

Select View Full Details from the row’s action menu. The page becomes Patient Discharge Details; Back to Discharges returns you to the list.
2

Read Patient Information and Ward Information

Patient Information carries identity, admission and discharge dates. Ward Information carries the ward, sub-ward, bed number and diagnosis.
3

Read the Discharge Summary

A stay discharged without one says No discharge summary available. — worth noticing, because that is a gap in the record rather than a display problem. The summary belongs to the clinician who discharged the patient: only they can change it afterwards. Anyone else who has something to add selects Add follow-up note, signs their own entry, and it appears under the summary. If the person who discharged has a supervisor, the summary shows Awaiting countersignature until the supervisor countersigns it or returns it to the author.
4

Read the Discharge card

Discharged to, Condition on discharge, Discharged by, and Attending at discharge — the clinician responsible for the stay at the moment it ended, or Not recorded for a stay discharged before this was tracked. Then Follow-up and Discharge medications, each None recorded. when nothing was entered.
5

Read the Treatment team card

Everyone who served on the stay, with their role and the period they served. No treatment team was recorded for this stay. when the stay predates the treatment team, or none was ever added.
6

Work through the stay under Patient History

Eight tabs cover everything that happened: Timeline, Consultations, Nursing Notes, Prescriptions, Lab Tests, Services, Radiology and Vitals. Start on Timeline for the shape of the admission, then open the tab that answers your actual question.
Each tab says plainly when there is nothing in it — No consultation records available, No nursing notes available, No lab test records available, and so on. That is a statement about the stay, not an error.

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Who can do this

This page checks nothing of its own: it is a read-only record of stays that have already ended, and anyone who can reach the Inpatient group can read it. Role navigation is what narrows that. The discharge permission below governs the ward chart, not this screen: Enforcement is opt-in per person: anyone who has never been saved in the permissions sheet is unrestricted, and the sheet warns “Saving starts enforcing” before you save the first one. A denied action is written to the audit log; an allowed one is not. Hiding the group from a role is a convenience, not a security boundary. See Staff permissions.

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Check it worked

  • The bed shows as free on the ward’s bed grid.
  • The patient appears in Ward Discharges with a discharge date of today.
  • Opening the row shows your text under Discharge Summary, not No discharge summary available.

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Common issues

Hover it. It is either This stay has already ended — someone else discharged them — or Discharge needs a connection — it frees a bed, which is a shared resource, meaning you are offline.
There is no undo. Admit them again from a consultation; they get a new stay, and the closed one stays in Ward Discharges exactly as it was. Tell your ward manager — the discharge is on the audit log with your name and the time.
It was discharged with the summary field left blank. The summary cannot be added to a closed stay, so record what happened as a clinical note against the patient instead.
Refresh the bed grid. If it stays occupied, the discharge did not complete — check whether the patient is in Ward Discharges at all before discharging a second time.
The tabs show what was recorded against this stay. Anything ordered before admission or after discharge belongs to the outpatient record — look under the patient’s record instead.
It needs the Enterprise plan and the In-patient care area in Settings → Facility. See Care areas.
Owners and managers can always discharge. Everyone else needs a role your clinic has chosen under Settings → Facility → Clinical access — see Facility — and, if your clinic restricts it further, the Discharge a patient permission. Ask an owner or manager.

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FAQ

No. Discharge ends the clinical stay only. Charges raised during the admission sit on the patient’s account and are settled through Billing in the normal way.
Yes, once the bed is free. It is a new admission with its own chart; the previous stay is untouched and stays under Ward Discharges.
The stay was discharged before ClinikEHR tracked who was attending at the moment of discharge. It is never guessed or filled in after the fact — a gap in an old record stays a gap.
Indefinitely, and the audit trail of who read them is kept for seven years. Nothing is pruned from Ward Discharges on a schedule.
No — Ward Discharges is a reading surface with no print or export control. The Radiology tab links out to the full imaging report, which does have its own download; everything else is read on screen.
Owners and managers, under Audit log. Every read of a patient record is logged with the reader’s name and the time — that is a HIPAA requirement, not a ClinikEHR choice.