Young Peoples Programmes

Every 18 minutes a child is admitted to hospital in the UK because of their asthma. Most of these admissions are preventable by the use of appropriate good self-management.

A Primary Care Trust with a population of 100,000 can expect 4,000 children to have been diagnosed with asthma with approximately 60 emergency admissions per year. Similar figures will be found for other chronic conditions such as diabetes.

Chronic conditions all have one thing in common which is that poor self-management of the condition leads to increased demands on the health, social and education services with rises in morbidity and mortality. It also reduces the quality of life of the young people.

Expert Patients Programme CIC has developed a range of programmes that are specifically designed to help young people and their families build self-management skills and techniques that will support them and may:

• Reduce feelings of isolation and depression
• Improve quality of life
• Provide potential for further support through contact with others with self-management experience and access to a wider network

The programmes address both the medical issues of self-care and the psycho social issues such as medication adherence, social isolation, communication, school, careers and issues about transition from children’s to adult services.