Poole Hospital Leads The Way For Young People Moving From Children’s To Adult Care
Poole Hospital Chief Executive Sue Sutherland with patients David Vater and Alex Palmer
Poole Hospital is leading the way in helping young people with long term illnesses to make a smooth transition from children’s to adult services.
The new transitional service for 14 to 19-year-olds was launched last week as a beacon to guide young people through the difficult move from children’s to adult care.
Leaving the children’s unit - where a young patient has been treated by familiar staff for up to 16 years - for an unknown adult ward can be a daunting and distressing experience.
The Government has set out clear guidance for transitional care and the arrangements at Poole are an innovative response to this.
Nurses and doctors from the children’s and adults’ wards at Poole Hospital have worked together in an unprecedented way to create a service that is built around the patient’s needs.
The work has been led by Viv Turner, Deputy Sister, and Karen Fernley, Sister, on the Children’s Unit and Geoffrey Walker, Matron for Medicine. Taking advice from young people, they have developed a comprehensive assessment tool which ensures that all the patient’s needs are met. This includes their emotional, social, sexual and working lives as well as their health care. Parents and families are also taken into account.
David Vater, a 19-year-old from Poole, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, is one of the young people who have worked with staff set up the new service.
David said that he felt distressed and angry when told that he was being discharged from the care of the children’s unit into that of an adult ward two years ago.
He welcomed the new transitional service and said: ‘It is great now but two years ago I was really scared about having to establish new relationships on the ward’.
Alex Palmer, aged 15, from Bournemouth, has been receiving treatment for cystic fibrosis since he was six months old. Alex was also anxious about moving onto an adult ward, but was grateful for the help given by the new service.
He said: ‘Viv Turner helped devise a plan which explained exactly what would happen. I miss the children’s ward because they made me so welcome and I was quite frightened about entering the adult ward, but I was very glad to have people to help me through this process’.
Chief Executive Sue Sutherland said: ‘The Government has set clear guidance about transitional arrangements and the Royal College of Nursing has produced guidelines, but this is not about process. This is about children’s and adult teams working together and involving young people so that services can be built around their needs.
‘This can be challenging but Poole Hospital is leading the way in this. I am very proud of the service that has been developed here and I am confident that it will work well for our young adults’.
Date: 6 February 2008