Improving adolescent care - You're Welcome

Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) is committed to improving the patient journey for all children, young people and their families. Recent surveys have highlighted some issues for young people including communication with professionals, privacy and dignity, lack of age appropriate facilities and transition to adult care.

The You’re Welcome improvement project at GOSH aimed to assess the Trust against the Department of Health You’re Welcome quality criteria.

These criteria, first published in 2005, were put together following concern regarding contemporary healthcare for adolescents, and recognition that patterns of health-related behaviour laid down in adolescence impact on long-term health behaviours. An updated version, published in 2011, establishes principles that enable healthcare professionals working in tertiary care to improve services by making them more young person friendly.

There is agreement that adolescents should not be treated like children or adults, and that the patient journey should be improved for this group of patients. This project was led by the Adolescent Service working with Audit and Transformation, and aimed to assess how adolescent friendly the hospital is. Young people were invited to take part in this project through the GOSH Young People's Forum, who identified priorities for improvement.

The Adolescent Medicine Team, supported by the Clinical Audit Department and Transformation Team, undertook a Trust-wide project to assess the young person-friendliness of GOSH in order to improve the experiences of our adolescent patients.

This project was adopted as a Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) project at GOSH.

You can download a here.