Discharge planning is the basis of continuous medical service. It could shorten the length of hospital stay, improve bed occu-pancy, reduce readmission rate, save medical costs, and improve the quality of life. It's considered to be important and supplemented by rele-vant policies and regulations to promote development in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and other developed countries. In China, even though Hong Kong and Taiwan have issued discharge planning policies, the mainland is still at the stage of explora-tion. Discharge planning in Chinese mainland has problems like restricted objectives, imperfect content, un-optimized process, unestablished professionals and organizations and so on. Standardized discharge planning guide still needs further research. As the health service system including hospitals, public health institutions and primary health institutions coverd urban and rural gradually, and the new pattern of grad-ing diagnosis and treatment established, it's necessary to analyze the necessity, importance, obstacles and measures of discharge planning in China.

With the social development and the transformation of medical model, providing patients with continuous services and seam-less transfer between different medical institutions, namely continuity care, is inevitable. Discharge planning take patients as the center and patient's needs as the guidance. Patients and their families should actively take part in the plan. Through multi-disciplinary and multi-institu-tional cooperation, patients can continue to enjoy health services after discharge. Discharge planning is the basis of continuous medical ser-vice. This article summrized the background and situation of discharge planning in the United States, Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Japan, India, South Africa, and Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland in China. When heavy medical burden, aging, im-balence between supply and demand occurred, discharge planning could be helpful to make rational use of medical resources, save medical costs, guarantee the quality of medical service continuity, avoid the occurrence of adverse events after discharge and improve the patients' function and quality of life. This article reviewed group members, time, institutions and process of discharge planning in order to provide ev-idence-based basis for the development of discharge planning in China.