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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 sheet opens.
3

Write the Discharge Summary

One field, Discharge Summary, with the prompt Enter discharge summary…. Cover the condition on discharge, the treatment given, the medicines going home, and the follow-up arranged.
4

Select Discharge Patient

ClinikEHR confirms with Patient discharged. The bed empties on the grid and the stay moves to Ward Discharges.
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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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, 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 the three summary cards

Patient Information (identity, admission and discharge dates), Ward Information (ward, sub-ward, bed number, attending doctor, diagnosis) and Discharge Summary. A stay discharged without a summary says No discharge summary available. — worth noticing, because that is a gap in the record rather than a display problem.
3

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

Your role decides whether the Inpatient group opens at all, and whether an owner has hidden it from that role under Role navigation. Permissions decide what you may do inside it, and they are granted per person: 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.

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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.
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.