Pediatric discharge transition survey demonstrates congruence with other validated tools

1. In this study, the Pediatric Transition Experience Measure (P-TEM) – an 8-item, parental response survey assessing the quality of hospital-to-home transitions for pediatric patients, demonstrated congruence with other previously validated transition assessment tools.

Evidence Rating Level: 1 (Excellent)

Study Rundown: Ensuring that patients safely transition from the hospital to home is critical and has been the focus of much research and many quality improvement endeavors across the country. In this prospective cohort study, researchers investigated the validity of a new transition tool, the P-TEM, which includes 8 items assessing patient and family readiness to transition from the hospital to home. The survey includes questions regarding understanding of discharge instructions, whether or not home needs were in place before discharge, ease of contacting follow-up providers after discharge, whether a follow-up appointment was scheduled at an appropriate time convenient for the family, and whether the follow-up provider was aware of the events of the hospital stay. Researchers compared participants’ responses to the P-TEM with their responses to other previously validated patient transition tools. Participant responses significantly correlated between the P-TEM and the previously validated surveys in many domains. While the study was limited by inclusion only of English-speakers from a single study site and dependence on parental literacy, overall, the P-TEM offers a unique way of assessing hospital-to-home discharge, bundling many aspects of this complex transition into one survey.

Click here to read the original article, published today in Pediatrics

Relevant Reading: Quality Measures to Assess Care Transitions for Hospitalized Children

In-Depth [prospective cohort]: In this study, researchers included English-speaking patients 1 month to 17 years old who were hospitalized on a medical or surgical unit at Seattle Children’s Hospital – a tertiary, academic children’s hospital – between January 2016 and October 2016. Patients were excluded if they were discharged from a hematology-oncology or an intensive care unit. The P-TEM included 8, parent-reported measures assessing 2 domains: transition preparation and transition support, each of which were assessed with 4 items. After excluding ineligible patients, 459 ultimately completed the P-TEM survey. As compared to those invited to take the survey, the final sample had a higher proportion of Caucasian patients and parents, relatively fewer medically complex patients, and a higher percentage of patients with a length of stay of 3 days or more. P-TEM responses were founds to correlated appropriately with responses to the Child Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (Child HCAHPS) survey and the Center of Excellence on Quality of Care Measures for Children with Complex Needs (COE4CCN) survey with β coefficient* absolute values of 7.5 and above for all domains, save for the COE4CCN domain assessing assistance with scheduling follow up appointments (β coefficient = -.2 – 4.6).

*The β coefficient compares the strength of the effect of each individual independent variable to the dependent variable. The higher the absolute value of the coefficient, the stronger the effect.

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