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BMJ Quality improvement report
Improving transition outcomes in adolescents with permanent hearing loss
  1. Chrysa Spyridakou,
  2. Surangi Mendis,
  3. Daniel DeVal
  1. Audiovestibular Medicine, Royal National Throat Nose and Ear Hospital, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Chrysa Spyridakou; chrysa.spyridakou{at}nhs.net

Abstract

Young people with permanent hearing loss need to transition into adult services and engagement with the transition process is required to achieve this. Although there are clear national recommendations about the transition process and transfer to the adult services limited evidence has been published about the implementation and efficacy of transition programmes in young adults with permanent hearing loss. The primary aim of this quality improvement project was to significantly increase the number of teenagers with a clear transition protocol documented in their notes. The secondary aims were to ensure good medical and audiological outcomes based on all completing their medical investigations prior to transfer to the adult services and also based on a survey regarding attitudes to hearing aids use. A multiphase intervention programme was developed ; (1) staff update with national transition protocols, (2) development of a clear transition protocol, (3) allocated key worker (4) access and (5) engagement. Through these interventions we increased the number of teenagers who had a clear transition protocol documented in their notes from 11% to 91%. 84% of our teenagers had completed their medical investigations, although documented discussion about the investigations had been done with 100% of the cohort. 9.2 % of adolescents felt pressurised to use hearing aids compared to 35% prior to the interventions. This project resulted in clear, measurable conclusions and we have shown that we better understand the needs of our

patients and the improvement is sustainable.

  • transitions in care
  • quality improvement
  • PDSA
  • checklists

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjoq-2018-000336

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors CS designed, analysed and wrote the paper. SM carried out the adolescents survey, analysed the results and contributed to the final version of the paper. DDV provided the data (list of adolescents with hearing loss) of the original audit.

    • Funding This quality improvement project was given the divisional Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital license in January 2017 by CAQIC.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.