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Care Fragmentation and Community Dislocation: Mapping the Skilled Nursing Facility Transfer Pipeline and the Need for Transitional Spiritual Care Across New Mexico

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Preprints.org
DOI
10.20944/preprints202609.1367.v1

Survival of severe acute illness in rural frontier regions frequently results in discharge to distant institutional care rather than a return to the patient's home community. This care fragmentation creates community dislocation, stripping patients of local support systems during vulnerable recovery phases and generating unique transitional spiritual distress. Using 559 chronic and acute disease discharges from the New Mexico Hospital Inpatient Discharge Data (2021 to 2023), we isolated 74 Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) transfers (13.2 percent of the cohort), of which 42 followed prolonged acute hospitalizations exceeding 14 days. We developed a Community Dislocation Index (CDI) integrating SNF transfer rates, prolonged acute stays, and rehabilitation-heavy diagnosis burdens. Spatial mapping revealed that rural counties experiencing high volumes of acute crises disproportionately exile recovering patients to urban institutional settings. The findings demonstrate that hospital chaplaincy must expand beyond end-of-life care to address the moral injury of autonomy loss and family separation, offering a reproducible framework for transitional spiritual care deployment in geographically fragmented healthcare networks.

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