Transitioning to an Adult Approach to Health Care Without Changing Clinicians
For use by Family Medicine and Med-Peds Clinicians
Transition Readiness
Assessing youths’ health care transition (HCT) readiness skills is the third element in the Six Core Elements of Health Care Transition™. Use of a standardized transition readiness assessment (TRA) is helpful in engaging youth and parents/caregivers to set health priorities, addressing self-care skill needs to prepare them for an adult approach to care at age 18, and preparing them to independently use health care services. Clinicians can use the results of the TRA to jointly develop a plan of care with youth and parents/caregivers. Clinicians should begin conducting TRAs at age 14 to 16 and continue throughout the HCT period until the youth has transitioned to an adult approach to care. Clinicians could change to the self-care skills assessment once the young adult is over age 18-21 to continue monitoring their self-care skills. For more information about the self-care skills assessment, see the implementation guide for Core Element 5. The TRA should be at the appropriate reading level, offered in languages common among your clinic population, and concise (no more than one page).
Implementation
Read more information on the QI framework and methods in our Quality Improvement Primer.
Implementation: Transition Readiness
For each core element, we have created an implementation guide to assist you in establishing a structured transition approach in your practice/clinic/health system. It offers quality improvement (QI) guidance on what information and processes should be considered when undertaking each core element, with examples from different care settings or patient populations.
Before starting, we recommend you read How to Implement the Six Core Element of Health Care Transition, which provides a set of practical start-up steps and tips to guide your health care transition approach. In addition, if you have more questions about the QI aspects of this implementation guide, there are links within it to a Quality Improvement Primer that offers further explanations for common examples of QI tools.