Transition Compass

Chronic health conditions require lifelong engagement with specialist care. An estimated 2.5 million young Australians will require transition from child to adult services over the next 20 years. However, there are no national guidelines or standardised models of care for transition across Australia. The transfer from paediatric to adult care puts many patients at a higher risk for medication non-adherence, is a high-risk period for loss to follow up and leads to increased disease-related morbidity and mortality.

To address this issue, K2A collaborated with the ACI Transition Care Network to host a national roundtable on transition to adult health services. This resulted in a networked submission to the NHMRC MRFF grant scheme to evaluate a new model of transition care and was successfully awarded $4.7 million over five years. The consumer engagement strategy was developed by the K2A/Child UnLimited Consumer Engagement Officer to ensure that consumers are engaged from the beginning as active participants in the research process. The program collaborated with young people and families from the Child UnLimited Consumer platform to co-design the intervention and develop a scalable model of care. This will be a world first, multi-site trial of a tailored intervention to improve the transition to adult care for young adults with chronic medical conditions.