Patient Cohort
There is a provincial diabetes database that captures all patients in NL diagnosed with type 1 diabetes up to 2015, based on the reporting of all diabetes nurses and diabetes educators in the province. A description of how cases were ascertained is available elsewhere.11,10 Using this database, we identified patients who turned 19 and transitioned to adult care between 2008-2013, the last year we were able to get complete patient data. Patient records were linked via coded identifiers to the Provincial Discharge Abstract Database (discharges from acute care facilities). We examined the number of patients transitioning into adult care and the basic demographic information about them. To compare the impact of transition on hospitalization rates, we looked at patients’ hospitalizations in the three-year period both before and after their 18thbirthday, around the point at which they would have transitioned.