Hospital youth work and adolescent support

This paper describes the development of a youth worker role in providing young people with more appropriate care and support in the hospital setting. Recent reports have highlighted the increasing use of hospital beds through adolescence and the paucity of facilities and support that adolescent patients encounter.1–3 Adolescent patients are recognised as having a number of problems related to their stage of development in addition to those associated with chronic illness. Educational opportunities may be lost, self esteem may suffer, and social relationships may be adversely affected.4 There may be major issues with non-adherence to treatment.5–8 Increasingly successful treatments for childhood chronic illness means an increasing number of young people will be facing the transition from paediatric to adult units with all the attendant problems.9–13 Like many paediatric units, we had renamed ourselves as a Children & Young People’s Unit and developed an adolescent policy document. However, there was an insufficient throughput of patients to warrant the development of a unit for young people only, and there were few nurses on the ward with any experience of adolescent nursing. We proposed employing a youth worker as part of our multiprofessional team to: Youth workers work mainly with young people between 11 and 25 years of age in the community and aim to promote their personal and social development with a range of informal educational activities which combine enjoyment, challenge, and learning.14 The increasing importance of youth work has recently been stressed by the UK government.15 Our team members felt that young people with chronic illness …