Teaching Adolescents to Manage Their Own Health Care

Abstract

Many factors impact an adolescent’s willingness to appropriately use health-care services and intent to begin the health-care transition process. Published literature continues to show that the way adolescents experience and utilize health-care services is ineffective and has long-term impacts on individuals and systems. Building upon the success of an existing peer-to-peer workshop, a Toolkit was created to provide school-based health professionals the information and resources needed to deliver pertinent information to high school students in one lesson. Of 416 students, over two thirds reported that they plan to be more involved in their health care (69.8%), advocate for themselves in health-care settings (68.0%), talk openly and honestly with health-care providers (71.9%), and learn more about managing their own health care (68.6%). Integrating this information into existing health curricula provided a broader reach with minimal work and promising results that could improve overall health-care transition efforts.