What is it about?
We used information from one health system's electronic medical record to following a group of teenagers and young adults with chronic diseases, like cystic fibrosis, diabetes, and heart defects. We were trying to see if they were staying with their pediatric doctors, moving to adult doctors, or not seeing a doctor as often as they should be.
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Why is it important?
It turns out that some teenagers who need to see a doctor regularly for a chronic illness, such as cystic fibrosis or a heart defect, stop seeing the doctor when they are teenagers, and even more stop seeing the doctor when they move from seeing pediatric doctors to seeing adult doctors. Now that we know the problem exists, we can work on better solutions.
Perspectives
The move from being a teenager to being an adult is difficult. There are a lot of life changes all happening at once. For teenagers with a chronic illness, growing up is made even more complicated by having to manage the illness in addition to all the other tasks of growing up. It's easy to imagine that young people would have trouble finding and getting comfortable with new doctors in the adult world, but we can't help them with those important tasks very well if they stop seeing their pediatric doctors too.
Laura Hart
Nationwide Children's Hospital
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Where Did They Go? Tracking Young Adult Follow-up During the Transition From Pediatric to Adult-Oriented Care, Clinical Pediatrics, June 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0009922819852980.
You can read the full text:
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