Quality of care during rural care transitions: a qualitative study on structural conditions.

Care actors, educators, managers, and decision-makers need to understand how structures in the physical, social and symbolic environment interactively affect the quality of care during care transitions since understanding this is a prerequisite for improvements. These aspects must be considered to optimize conditions for high-quality care transitions from hospital to rural home healthcare and implemented continuously to improve transitions within the respective organization and inter-organizationally. According to this study, these aspects are critical in a rural context due to structural care quality influencers such as geographical challenges, difficulties in finding competent staff members, development of technical devices, and access to the Internet.