Improving transition from child to adult health services for young people with cerebral palsy living in Ireland.
In Ireland, people with cerebral palsy (CP) receive healthcare from children's services up to the age of 18, after which they transfer to adult services. Poor management of the transition from child to adult health services can lead to poor health and increased hospital admissions. While there are practices that health professionals can use to improve this process of transitioning to adult services, such as arranging for the young person to meet the adult team before they transfer, there is no information about how the transition process is managed for young people with CP in Ireland. In this project, we will collect information and create resources to help improve the transition process for young people with CP in Ireland.
We will firstly identify gaps in current management of the transition to adult services. We will use a survey to ask young people with CP, aged 16 to 22, if they experienced several important practices during the process of transitioning from child to adult services. We will also ask health professionals if they use these practices. We will then interview young people with CP, their families, and health professionals to find out how best to use these practices in the Irish healthcare system in order to improve the process of transition. We will use the information collected to produce resources to support health professionals to improve the experience of transitioning from child to adult services for young people with CP. We will produce these resources with the help of young people with CP and their families to make sure that the resources include information that they think is important and are easy to use.
This project will improve the experience of transitioning to adult services for young people with CP in Ireland, which may improve their long-term health and wellbeing.
- Award Date
- 30 June 2019
- Award Value
- €204,327.00
- Principal Investigator
- Mr Jennifer Ryan
- Host Institution
- Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland
- Scheme
- Applied Partnership Awards