“Adult providers know those systems better,” says Brett Pickering, MD, director of the Special Needs Clinic at San Diego’s UCSD Medical Center, Department of Pediatrics.
The adult patient has different emotional needs than the pediatric patient, and the pediatric hospitalist may not be in tune with adult needs. “Pediatricians do a lot of handholding,” says Dr. Pickering. “Adult providers are more matter of fact.”
Age restrictions on admissions, insurance, and funding issues also affect transition. For example, funding under the Social Security Act’s Title V Children with Special Health Care Needs typically ends at 21 despite a patient’s education or employment status.
Given these factors, what is the appropriate age to transition care from a pediatric floor or facility to an adult-oriented unit? According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the responsibility of pediatrics continues through age 21, but there’s no hard-and-fast rule.
Challenges
The transition to adult-care facilities is typically a lengthy process involving multiple specialties and possibly joint care during a transition period—and a process that should ideally be coordinated by the patient’s primary care pediatrician. But hospitalists know that circumstances are typically far from ideal.
First, during a transition, the patient may feel abandoned by the medical team they’ve known for most of their lives. It takes time to develop trust and confidence in a new doctor. In this respect, pediatric hospitalists in facilities that care for patients of all ages have an advantage over hospitalists in children’s hospitals. They can call on their adult-care colleagues in other areas of the hospital for consultations and transfer care over time.
“The pediatric hospitalist must make bridges with their adult colleagues who are comfortable [with the issues] and willing to take on this patient population,” says Dr. Pickering.
Second, parents may feel an emotional dependency on the pediatric team and can feel threatened by the adult environment as they lose some control. To the parents, the patient will always be their child, Dr. Pickering notes.
Third, pediatric hospitalists may be reluctant to let go, particularly if they feel adult services are inferior to those they have provided, which brings us to the fourth major challenge: To whom do you transition care?
Many adult healthcare providers receive only limited training in disorders associated with pediatrics (e.g., CF, spina bifida). The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is leading the way in educating physicians in what have historically been considered pediatric problems. In the 1980s, the foundation launched an educational program to train physicians already involved in adult pulmonary care in CF. Unfortunately, education in other areas has lagged. And finding a physician with both an interest in and knowledge of such disorders can prove challenging.
“It’s incumbent on our adult colleagues to take these patients on, but they need training,” says Dr. Pickering. “Long-term issues require long-term solutions.
How do you jazz people up to take care of this population?” she asks. Physicians must have at least a little bit of desire to learn about these special patient populations, but academic institutions also need to identify core knowledge and skills and make them part of training and certification requirements for primary care residents and physicians in practice. Continuing medical education for physicians, nurses, and allied healthcare professionals should include drug dosing, medical complications seen in transition populations, and related developmental, psychosocial, and behavioral issues.
Steps to a Successful Transition
So what should hospitalists do? In an April 2005 presentation at the SHM Annual Meeting, Joseph M. Geskey, DO, assistant professor of pediatrics and medicine, and director of inpatient pediatrics at Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, Penn., recommended that pediatric hospitalists take the following steps: