Are we transforming transition?

My head is reeling from all of the bright ideas and madness floated at yesterday’s Transforming Transition workshop in Birmingham. Thanks to everyone who came along and shared so much good material on what was a really great day.

Sharon Varney and Sandra Dodgson did a brilliant job designing the meeting – and I promise that the next time we try to start off with a Blue Peter-style exercise I’ll make sure we have glue sticks and enough pairs of scissors (maybe we’ll try to tempt Val Singleton out of retirement).

As well as our 13 nurses (or transition champions – thanks Clare, your post on Haemnet has been noted!), it was great to have Harry, Luke and Laurence with us to keep proceedings grounded in reality. And, of course, we have to thank Jess, Damien and Dilly from CreativeConnection for THAT picture (our visual minutes from the meeting), which will give us so much to reflect on and work with over the coming year or two. Thanks also to our funders, the Burdett Trust for Nursing, without whom it wouldn’t have happened.

Special thanks go to Trish Bell, who did a grand job of presenting the Ready Steady Go programme developed at Southampton Children’s Hospital. The programme website and video can be found HERE.

It’s clearly a fabulous resource for both clinicians and patients and several times through the day I found myself wondering why we were there: surely if everyone adopted Ready Steady Go, transition as an issue would just go away, and nobody would need to come to our workshops? Sadly, probably not. Although Ready Steady Go is a brilliant resource in relation to patient self-management, as several of our exercises yesterday demonstrated, implementing it effectively may still pose a challenge in many centres. What’s more, it doesn’t fully address the other two aspects that that our nurses identified and discussed in our first workshop – that of nurse leadership of transition (clearly an issue in several centres) and of changing working practices. Those two aspects, along with promoting patient engagement, came high on the list of priorities for development identified by our nurses. Indeed, we’ve already had a couple of approaches for help. So over the next couple of weeks, Sharon, Sandra and I will be looking at how we can tackle each of these areas in more detail.

These workshops meetings are all about nurses coming together and sharing experiences and challenges. We hope that everyone went away with ideas to put into practice. Are we transforming transition? YES WE ARE.

Mike Holland is medical writer and the founder of Haemnet, and The Journal of Haemophilia Practice