The use of the concept of transition in different disciplines within health and social welfare: An integrative literature review.
Ulrika Lindmark, Pia H Bülow, Jan Mårtensson and 1 others
PMID 31367388WHAT IT FOUND
Across 350 health and welfare papers, the concept of transition described health-illness and situational changes, not tested patient outcomes.
Nursing studies often viewed transitions from the professional's perspective; occupational therapy focused more on daily life, and social work on the person's perspective.
Key findings
01Health-illness transition was the most common type described (41.7%), followed by situational transition (36.9%).
02In nursing, the professional perspective was twice as common as the second most used perspective, which was the patient/client perspective.
03Occupational therapy studies most often examined transition in daily life (35.9%), and social work studies used the person's perspective in 38.1% of articles.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The review was guided by systematic steps but was not a full systematic review. It included articles published only between 2003 and 2013, so more recent use of transition is not covered. It included only English original articles and excluded reviews, meeting abstracts and articles with missing abstracts. It examined only nursing, occupational therapy, oral health, social work and interdisciplinary studies, not medicine, psychology or social pedagogy. Interrater agreement was 68% in the first screening step and 84% after discussion; interdisciplinary expertise was noted as both a possible limitation and a strength. Most included studies were from North America (60%) and Europe (22%), so use in other regions may be underrepresented. The review describes how a concept was used in research; it does not test whether transition-focused care improves patient outcomes.
Declared interests
No conflict of interest was declared by the authors.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that using the concept of transition improves patient outcomes. The paper maps how 350 research articles used the concept of transition; it did not test an intervention or measure clinical outcomes.