Care transitions from the hospital to home are critical to the sustainability of our health care system. Inadequate care transitions from the hospital to home are not uncommon as indicated by research demonstrating a high incidence of adverse events after hospitalization, as well as poor communication with patients and families during transitions and inadequate information exchange among health care providers [
1‐
3]. All of these can lead to fragmented care, higher readmission rates, increased visits to the emergency department, and ultimately poor patient outcomes. Despite multiple person- and family-centered care interventions currently in place in hospitals, care transitions, particularly from the hospital to home, continue to be fragmented and to pose high safety risks [
4].
Person- and family-centered care (PFCC) is defined as care that is “respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values, and ensures that patient values guide all clinical decisions” [
5]. Sidani and Fox have grouped PFCC processes into three components, which consist of holistic care, collaborative care, and responsive care [
6]. Research shows that patients who are more involved in the decision-making process related to their care are better able to manage complex chronic conditions [
7‐
9], have reduced anxiety and stress [
10], and have shorter lengths of stay in the hospital [
11]. Patient/family engagement is fundamental to a PFCC approach, and it is also key to improving overall patient care in our health care system [
12]. Although there are several reviews that studied interventions for care transitions from the hospital to home [
13‐
15], to date, only one review of the literature by Desai and colleagues [
16] focused on examining the impact of PFCC transition processes from the hospital or the emergency department to the home. However, this paper exclusively looked at studies published in the USA, leading to a potential bias against countries with socialized medical care. Desai et al. [
16] found four pediatric emergency department to home studies that demonstrated an association between tailored discharge education and patient outcomes and other studies that showed an association between a transition need assessment (
n = 4) or an individualized transition care plan (
n = 6) with better patient outcomes in the adult population [
16]. To expand to countries with socialized medicine, and to conduct an expanded search of this previous literature review by adding further search terms (e.g., person- and family-centered care), we will critically analyze the body of evidence regarding the effectiveness of PFCC transition interventions from the hospital to home on the quality of care, and the experience of patients in the adult population. The specific objectives are:
1)
To critically review the evidence on PFCC interventions on the quality of care, and experience of patients
2)
To determine the effectiveness of PFCC interventions on improving the quality of care, and the experience of patients
3)
To explore the effectiveness of these interventions on different population subgroups, if possible (e.g., male versus female participants), and/or different intervention types (e.g., patient versus family interventions).