Searching the literature on transition to adult care

We seem to get a lot of requests for literature on transition between the pediatric and adult care systems. I have searched this question for adolescents with chronic conditions, for children with mental illnesses, and adolescents with diabetes, among others, so I thought I’d share a tip on searching in Medline around these topics. The heading Transition to Adult Care was added to MeSH in 2012, presumably because this is becoming a hot policy issue. Previously, articles on this topic were indexed with the heading “Continuity of Patient Care,” a much broader subject heading that also included non-related things like continuity of care when patients are transferred to a different level of care or type of facility.

It appears there has been no retrospective re-indexing of older articles with the new subject heading, so unfortunately any searches done on this topic in the next few years will need to employ both terms to ensure a complete search. You can filter your results somewhat by limiting to Adolescents and Young Adults (19-24 years), or by adding in the keyword “transition*”, which is almost always used in articles on this topic.