Transition: strategic approaches
Find out why you need to plan strategically for transition and how you can embed transition across your organisation.
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What's on this page
Transition is everyone’s business
Whether your service is for children or adults, at some point it’s likely that you will need to support young people who are:
- beginning to move from children’s palliative care services into adulthood
- in the process of moving
- have recently transitioned into adult care.
When children and young people are being discharged from a familiar service, planning is key. It is important to start preparing them and their families as early as possible so they can understand the options available to them and decide what suits them best.
For young people who transition from children’s services into adult services it is really important to get a balanced ‘push and pull’ from one service into the other.
Raising awareness of young people’s needs across your organisation will help you ensure everyone understands how to support this population.
Strategic and integrated planning
Transition touches all aspects of a young person’s life. It requires integrated working between children’s and adult services, as well as wider health and care providers. Developing a strategic, holistic and patient-centred approach to transition will help you work in partnership with others to ensure young people’s needs are met.
Transition should be included in your hospice or palliative care service’s overall strategy and business plan.
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Together for Short Lives has developed a framework that can be used by commissioners and local organisations to plan multi-agency services for young people with life-limiting or life-threatening health conditions as they grow up and move into adult services.
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Helen and Douglas House has developed a toolkit to help services consider how best to provide transitional care.
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The University of York demonstrates how young people with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions can be supported to co-design services.
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Together for Short Lives provides information to help you support young people with life-limiting or life-threatening conditions as they transition to adult services.
Workforce
Your workforce plays a huge role in whether or not a young person’s experience of transition will be positive. As well as making sure all your staff and volunteers have an understanding of young people’s needs, it’s helpful to have specialists who are either employed in a transition role or who have a special interest in the care of young people.
The role of the transition worker varies across the country. We have been given permission to share some example job descriptions:
Transition Services Coordinator - Noah's Ark
Children and Young People (CYP) Engagement Officer - Demelza
Young Adults Transition Lead - Bolton Hospice
Transition Lead (Project Post) - Keech Hospice Care
Youth / Transition Worker - Helen and Douglas House
Training and learning resources
Several organisations provide training about transition support. (Please note that the content and views expressed by these organisations do not represent the views of Hospice UK).
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The Queen’s Nursing Institute (with funding from the the Burdett Trust for Nursing) has developed an online learning resource for community and primary care professionals, which helps them improve the experience of young people transitioning from children’s to adult services.
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The 10 Steps Transition Pathway was developed by Lynda Brook and Jacqui Rogers with the support of the Transition Team at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. It includes training videos for professionals.
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The TIER Network (Transition and Patient Empowerment Innovation, Education and Research Collaboration) have developed the Ready Steady Go programme to support clinicians delivering transition.
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Find out more about Hospice UK’s work to support workforce development.
Research
Together for Short Lives carried out a literature search on Transition, with a commentary from Carrie James, ECHO Transition Partnership Manager at Hospice UK.