Factors Influencing the Implementation of Transitional Care for Adolescents With Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities: Experiences of Dutch Healthcare Professionals.
Ilse Ooms, AnneLoes van Staa, Erica Witkamp and 1 others
PMID 41823085WHAT IT FOUND
Dutch professionals rated their transition care for adolescents with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities 6.2 out of 10.
Records do not talk to each other, adult teams lack expertise, funding will not pay for coordination, and parents carry the burden.
Key findings
01The professionals' accounts clustered into three levels of influence, (inter)personal, organisational and environmental, which the authors then mapped onto the seven domains of an existing checklist of what makes practice change happen.
02Information transfer between services was named as a barrier: referral documentation was inadequate, joint consultations and 'warm handovers' were rare, and patient record systems in different organisations do not synchronise.
03Two obstacles sat outside the clinicians' control: too few intellectual disability physicians in adult care, and no funding for coordination or for two clinicians to attend the same consultation.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
Participants were recruited partly through the authors' own networks, so people with a particular interest in transition are likely over-represented; the authors acknowledge this may have introduced selection bias. The analysis began from seven pre-set domains of an existing checklist, which the authors accept could produce confirmation bias; they argue this is unlikely because coding started open-ended and the diagram was only shown after participants had answered the open questions. The findings are the professionals' own accounts of their practice, and the 6.2 out of 10 is their self-rating, not an assessment against any standard. All participants were doctors or nurse practitioners. No physiotherapists, occupational therapists or speech and language therapists took part, so the paper does not describe what those disciplines do or need. The funding rules, insurance codes and legal arrangements discussed are specific to the Netherlands, so the practical obstacles may not transfer to other systems.
Declared interests
Funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), grant number 023.020.002. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the recommendations in this paper as evidence that a transition guideline, a named coordinator or a shared-care model works. Nothing was tested here. The study reports what 20 Dutch professionals said about their own practice, several of them recruited through the authors' networks, and the 6.2 out of 10 is their own rating rather than a measured standard.
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