In dealing with avoidable care transitions, it is important to have a clear, consensus-based definition and a “working” decision support tool. However, it was argued that there is still a lack of a clear definition and an objective measuring tool.
In the international scientific literature, there were no consensus and no clear definition on avoidable care transitions. This caused some miscommunication on what “avoidable” means and limited comparability among international studies. Moreover, many assessment tools dealing with avoidability of care transitions were developed and some proved to be successful. However, there is no such thing as a “golden standard” assessment tool. Existing assessment tools are limited to a specific care setting or/and population. Navigating across a number of existing assessment tools and most importantly, choosing the right one was challenging and time-consuming.
In this project, we tried to address both of the gaps and we believe that we successfully addressed these challenges. As a result, we have developed a practice tool (i.e. deliverable) which addresses both of the gaps above and embraces 1) a new, consensus-based definition for “avoidable care transitions” and 2) a comprehensive navigation infrastructure that helps to choose the right assessment tool with further critical appraisal.
The deliverable is prepared in the electronic form (website). This is a comprehensive database composed of 29 systematically organized and critically appraised so-called assessment tools. These different assessment tools were identified via prior systematic literature review, and cover various care settings, health conditions and so on. Of course, these assessment tools are appropriate for this project´s target population – older adults and their caregivers, and care professionals. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive database (website) of such kind. The website (i.e. deliverable) also introduces our new consensus-based definition that provides overall guiding principles on avoidability of care transitions. The new definition was developed on earlier work: a literature review and a Delphi study.
We believe our deliverable (website) has good chances for practical use, and that it will be useful not only for our initial target population, but also for researchers. This product (website) has a great potential for further enhancement (for example improving functionality of the product, adding more features, adding further assessment tools, and so on.). In light of this, this product is rather a “living project” and therefore we present here the version 1.0 of the product (website).
We are glad to announce that our deliverable (i.e. website) is now live and can be accessed at: decision4transition.com
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