Stage 5: collating, summarising and reporting the results

Aligning to the specific questions that our scoping review aimed to answer (listed under the Stage 1: defining the research question section), we summarised findings along the dimensions of (1) readmission time interval, (2) unnecessary readmission definition and (3) case-mix adjustment approach used by our reviewed articles. We also assessed the extracted data for any prevalent trends in study characteristics across our reviewed articles, and independently reviewed the data to identify any emergent themes. We used constant comparison combined with consensus-building discussions²¹ to finalise notable trends and themes to be reported.