Investigators: Dr Keely Bebbington
Project description
When young adults with type 1 diabetes (T1D) transition from paediatric to adult care they can face a myriad of challenges, and often so do their parents. Young adults with T1D can suffer from poor mental health during this period. When young adults have poor mental health, they tend to not think about their diabetes management tasks. This can mean their blood glucose levels fluctuate, causing something known as “diabetes burnout” where they disengage from their diabetes management. Contributing to this is the additional responsibility for their diabetes management that is expected of adults. At the same time, they need to get to know a new clinical team and a new place. All these things can mean that many young adults with T1D stop going to clinic. This can lead to poor physical and mental health.
In our project, we want to understand what young adults with T1D experienced as they moved to adult care. We will partner with them to design a mode of transition to adult care that will be best for all involved. We will make the design process a fun and creative workshop to get ideas and in a later project we will try out some of these ideas to see what works best. The research team believes that when trying to improve services for young adults with T1D in Western Australia we must start with understanding the experiences of those people who have recently moved to adult care and the experiences also of their parents. It is also important to involve young people with T1D, their parents and healthcare professionals in the design of their own future programs. By doing this we feel we will help young adults with T1D and their parents live a healthy and happy life.
Project outputs
We anticipate that the findings will have a wide audience including the general public, diabetes and research staff. We intend to publish results via a manuscript and present the findings at a national or international conference and at workshops of other institutions engaged in researching paediatric diabetes and at local professional development meetings.
External collaborators
- Perth Children's Hospital
Funders
- Children’s Diabetes Centre
- PCHF