Transitioning youth to adult healthcare: new tools from the Illinois Transition Care Project.

Purpose: To improve youths' transition to adult healthcare, especially for youth with disabilities, The Illinois Transition Care Project created separate, yet complementary, curricula for pediatric and adult-oriented providers.

Methods: Content from the curricula was tested by practicing physicians. The project created a library of skill worksheets with functional goals for patients.

Transition Planning for Youth With Special Health Care Needs (YSHCN) in Illinois Schools.

"Transition Planning for Youth with Special Health Care Needs (YSHCN)" chronicles the research and work completed by agencies in Illinois to provide examples of best practice in transition planning. Increasing numbers of YSHCN survive into adulthood creating a need for focus on the transition to adult life for these young people, including meeting health care needs. As a part of the Transitions project, the Illinois Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the University of Illinois at Chicago Division of Specialized Care for Children surveyed Illinois public high schools to identify transition planning efforts, staff training needs and used those results to develop and implement training.

The capacity of primary care pediatricians to care for children with special health care needs.

Objective: To measure the willingness and ability of primary care pediatricians (PCPs) to accept children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN) into their practices.

Methods: Surveys were mailed to 1441 members of the Illinois Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics practicing primary care.

Results: In all, 376 physicians were eligible for analyses.

Barriers to care for children and youth with special health care needs: perceptions of Illinois pediatricians.

OBJECTIVE. To assess primary care pediatricians' (PCPs') perceptions of caring for children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN). METHODS.

Illinois medical home project: pilot intervention and evaluation.

A "medical home" provides accessible, continuous, comprehensive, family-centered, coordinated, compassionate, and culturally effective care. This study implemented and evaluated the pilot phase of a pediatric practice-directed medical home quality improvement (QI) project focused on improving primary care for children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN). Six practices received training, QI team development and facilitation, and receipt of mini-grants for QI projects.