JPP Student Journal Club Commentary: Advancing Transition Medicine for Adolescents and Young Adults with Chronic Conditions

Significant strides in transition medicine have been made over the past two decades to better support adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with chronic medical conditions in navigating the shift from pediatric to adult care (White& Cooley, 2018). However, complexities remain, including challenges ensuring AYAs have adequate disease knowledge and self-management skills, reluctance breaking well-established pediatric patient-provider relationships, and difficulty finding adult providers (Callahan et  al., 2001). The U.S. healthcare system continues to struggle with effectively supporting AYAs prior to and through this transition, resulting in prolonged gaps in and disengagement from medical care, suboptimal treatment adherence, reduced quality of life, increased emergency healthcare utilization, and poor health outcomes (Eaton et  al., 2017;Hobart& Phan, 2019). While pediatric psychologists play several important roles in transitioning AYAs to adult healthcare (Gray et  al., 2015), there are few empirically supported behavioral interventions for transition across chronic conditions (Hart et  al., 2019), especially for AYAs with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Source: Journal of Pediatric Psychology - Category: Pediatrics Source Type: research