Transition from Pediatric to Adult Healthcare Services for Adolescents and Young Adults with Long-term Conditions

This book offers essential information on interventions and actions that enable and promote transition experiences for adolescents and young adults. It provides guidance on appropriate strategies that bring together these groups and caregivers in the context of transition preparation, and those which optimize adolescents' and young adults' ability to self-manage their healthcare.

The health care transition for adolescents and young adults has gained more attention given the improved survival rates, including for those with long-term conditions. It is now estimated that more than 90% of children diagnosed with a long-term condition will survive into adulthood. The significant change in survival requires concomitant services to facilitate adolescents' and young adults' successful transition to adult health care, therefore providers need education, knowledge and skills to support healthcare transition services. A recent US national survey demonstrated only 10% of parents/caregivers reported that their children received transition preparation services.

This book is targeted at nurses and pediatric and adult health care providers of different disciplines seeking guidance on which interventions are available, how they can be used, advantages and challenges, and how best to promote a seamless transition for all adolescents and young adults with long-term conditions. It provides several examples of transition programmes and initiatives worldwide. There is an increasing focus on how nurses can support transition but little guidance on what is effective and what has been tried. This book will fill a gap by addressing all of these issues outlined above and by providing worked examples from leading nurse researchers and academics worldwide.

Dedication. - Foreword by Cecily Betz and Imelda Coyne. - Chapter 1. Introduction/Overview. - Chapter 2. Empowering young persons during the transition to adulthood (examples from Congenital Heart Disease, Belgium). - Chapter 3. Determinants of quality of healthcare for adolescents and young adults within different cultures. - Chapter 4. Evidence base for nurses roles in the transitional care for young people with long term care. (drawing on a systematic review and examples from UK). - Chapter 5. Analysis of self-management and transition measures for nursing practice in transition. - Chapter 6. On Your Own Feet: How to improve transitional care and young people' s self-management. A practical framework for nurses (programme in Netherlands). - Chapter 7. Nurses role in developing and monitoring for transition related outcomes. - Chapter 8. Benchmarks for transition as an initiative to improve transitional care services (examples from UK). - Chapter 9. Transition in Cystic Fibrosis: an international experience. - Chapter 10. Adaptation of a Broad-Based Youth Transition Programme: A Nurse-Led Cystic Fibrosis Transition Initiative. - Chapter 11. Nurse-led effort in developing, implementing and evaluating health care transition and promoting developmentally appropriate health care in young people with bleeding disorders. - Chapter 12. Transitional care for young adults with chronic endocrine disorders (not diabetes). - Chapter 13. Conclusion. - Chapter 14. Tools for Practice; research instruments that might be considered (i. e. readiness assessment; QoL measures; and so forth).