Feasibility and Preliminary Effectiveness of a Transitional Care Program on Cardiac Self‑Efficacy and Transitional‑Care Knowledge Among Patients Awaiting Elective Coronary Artery Bypass Graft: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: Patient who are going to undergo CABG surgery face stressful situations that affect their cardiac selfefficacy and recovery.TCPs that link hospital and home environments can make a difference in their self-management and psychological functioning.Aim: Feasibility and preliminary effects of a nurse-led TCP in improving transitional care knowledge, cardiac selfefficacy, depression, anxiety, and stress of patients undergoing CABG surgery in India.Methods: This parallel-group pilot randomized controlled study included 20 adults who needed a CABG procedure.Participants were assigned randomly to receive either TCP intervention along with usual care (10 subjects) or usual care alone (10 subjects).The TCP comprised educational activities regarding lifestyle modification, stress management (through yoga and breathing techniques), and drug compliance.Measurements were taken before and after the intervention through a transitional-care knowledge scale that consisted of 40 items, Cardiac Self-Efficacy Scale of 13 items, and Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS-21).Results: All 20 subjects who had been randomized successfully went through both the pre-and post-test measures within a span of 7 weeks, thus establishing high feasibility of this research project.After conducting the intervention session, the experimental group showed improvement with respect to their transitional care knowledge (decrease in poor knowledge from 6 to 1 member).The participants in the experimental group had shown a marked increase in their cardiac self-efficacy scores (pre-test 17-29 and post-test 20-41), while the control group had low-to-moderate scores (pre-test 15-31 and post-test 15-34).Furthermore, the experimental group showed favorable shifts toward milder depression and reduced severe stress and anxiety, outperforming the control group.Conclusions: The nurse-led TCP was highly feasible and demonstrated positive trends towards improvement in transitional care knowledge, cardiac self-efficacy, and psychological well-being.A fully powered randomized control trial is needed.