How older people enact care involvement during transition from hospital to home: A systematic review and model

Current models of patient-enacted involvement do not capture the nuanced dynamic and interactional nature of involvement in care. This is important for the development of flexible interventions that can support patients to 'reach-in' to complex health-care systems.

To develop a dynamic and interactional model of patient-enacted involvement in care.

Electronic search strategy run in five databases and adapted to run in an Internet search engine supplemented with searching of reference lists and forward citations.

Qualitative empirical published reports of older people's experiences of care transitions from hospital to home.

Reported findings meeting our definition of involvement in care initially coded into an existing framework. Progression from deductive to inductive coding leads to the development of a new framework and thereafter a model representing changing states of involvement.

Patients and caregivers occupy and move through multiple states of involvement in response to perceived interactions with health-care professionals as they attempt to resolve health- and well-being-related goals. 'Non-involvement', 'information-acting', 'challenging and chasing' and 'autonomous-acting' were the main states of involvement. Feeling uninvolved as a consequence of perceived exclusion leads patients to act autonomously, creating the potential to cause harm.

The model suggests that involvement is highly challenging for older people during care transitions. Going forward, interventions which seek to support patient involvement should attempt to address the dynamic states of involvement and their mediating factors.