The postpartum return-to-home transition: A narrative review

Shortened postpartum hospital stays worldwide have intensified the need for effective discharge preparation and continuity of care. The postpartum return-to-home transition remains underexplored within nursing-midwifery scholarship, limiting the development of structured approaches to support women and families during the early postpartum period. Using Meleis' Transitions Theory as an analytic lens, a narrative review was conducted to examine the nature of this transition, its conditions, patterns of response, and nursing-midwifery therapeutics. Searches were carried out in PubMed, CINAHL and Scopus (March 2026) and seven sources (five empirical studies and two non-empirical articles) met the inclusion criteria, three of which concerned the neonatal intensive care context; findings were extracted and mapped deductively onto the components of the theory. Transition conditions identified included parity, mode of birth, infant feeding, and parental knowledge. Discharge readiness was the most frequently measured pattern of response. Only one study assessed outcomes after discharge: lower readiness predicted post-discharge coping difficulty. Discharge education was the most frequently examined nursing-midwifery therapeutic. Structured continuity-of-care interventions, including home visits and telehealth, were also identified as important but inconsistently provided. The nature of the transition is conceptualized as a nested situational transition within the developmental transition to parenthood, refining Transitions Theory for nurse-midwives' practice in the postpartum period. The proposed framework may help inform nurse-midwives' assessment of transition conditions at discharge and the planning of follow-up, by addressing the full range of adaptive demands women and families face at home. The model requires empirical validation, particularly in routine postpartum care.