On Thursday 18 June 2026 at 14:00, Merete Ajstrup defends her PhD dissertation entitled “Transition of Care from hospital to home: Patient-reported experiences in a Danish Healthcare setting”. 

In a new PhD project from Health, Aarhus University, the two patient-reported instruments Partners at Care Measure (PACT-M) and Care Transitions Measure (CTM-15) have been translated into Danish, and their measurement properties have been examined with the aim of contributing to future improvements in care transitions from hospital to home. The project was carried out by Merete Ajstrup, who is defending her dissertation on June 18, 2026.

Transitions of care from hospital to home are complex and critical phases in patient pathways, during which patients are at risk of insufficient care coordination, lack of communication, uncertainty regarding post-discharge management of their health, and preventable readmissions. Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) represent a potential approach to integrating the patient perspective into the assessment of the quality of care transitions. The two PREMs, PACT-M and CTM-15, were developed to measure the patient-reported quality of transitions from hospital to home. The overall aim of the PhD project was to contribute to the improvement of care transitions from hospital to home by translating and validating PACT-M and CTM-15 in a Danish hospital context.

The project was based on a sequential research programme comprising three studies and a supplementary analysis. In the first study, PACT-M and CTM-15 were translated and culturally adapted according to established guidelines, and the relevance, comprehensibility and comprehensiveness of their content were assessed by both patients and healthcare professionals. In the second study, PACT-M and CTM-15 were distributed to patients after discharge from hospital, and based on their responses, structural validity was examined using confirmatory factor analyses and analyses of differential item functioning. In the third study, associations between patient characteristics and PACT-M and CTM-15 scores were analysed. Finally, supplementary analyses were conducted to examine the association between lower quality of care transitions measured one week after discharge and 30-day readmission.

The summary is written by the PhD student.

The defence is public and takes place in Auditoriet, Viborg Regional Hospital. Please see the press release for more information. 

Contact

PhD student Merete Ajstrup
Mail: merajs@rm.dk 
Phone: +45 61400949

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