Methodologies to measure access to care post-discharge in adults with serious injury-related disability: a scoping review

Published 14th June 2023

About the article

Access to care is fundamental for people with complex continuing needs, so they can achieve their best quality of life. How can we know if access to care is adequate unless it’s measured adequately? Do all stakeholders have a compatible understanding of access to care and its importance? This new scoping review describes access to care as a complex concept that is difficult to capture methodologically. Simple, inconsistent methodologies miss the realities of service users’ experiences and expectations, and lack comprehensive evidence for service planning and delivery. This reinforces an undesirable status quo for those with greater needs and greater difficulty in accessing care. 
 
With wide-reaching implications for rehabilitation medicine, this research establishes an urgent need for the use of multidimensional measures as standard practice in access-to-care research. Other key learnings from this research related to: 

• Approaches to rehabilitation research that are consistently comprehensive will shed more light on users’ experiences and how to strengthen their engagement with services. 
• The development, validation and use of multidimensional measures of access to care will better capture the complexity of rehabilitation care and what users value.
• With more comprehensive evidence, consensus will evolve regarding the gold standard of core measures of access to rehabilitation care;  this will consolidate service reach and relevance. 

 

Citation

Burridge, L.,  Jones, R.,  Borg, S,J., O’Loghlen, J,J., & Geraghty, T,J. Methodologies to measure access to care post-discharge in adults with serious injury-related disability: a scoping review. Disability and Rehabilitation, 2024; 46:7, 1266-1273. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2023.2192974  

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