Hello Again – supporting young adults transitioning to an adult burns care team

Hello Again is a website for young adults with burn injuries making the transition to an adult burn care team.

The Northern Burn Care Network, Clinical Psychologist Service Development Group (CPSDG) are a group of psychologists who work together to improve the quality of care in Burns Services in the North of England. They identified that there was a lack of information available to support young people making the transition from children’s burn care into adult services and decided to do something about it. After successfully applying for funding from Dan’s Fund for Burns, they started a project to address this that resulted in the development of a website, ‘Hello Again’ and accompanying leaflet.

The CPSDG recognised that many young people who have had a burn injury as a child build up strong and supportive relationships with the burns team at their children’s hospital and so moving on to the adult burns services can be a daunting prospect. The website ‘Hello Again’ (www.hello-again.co.uk) has been designed with this in mind and sets out to offer a friendly and informative welcome from adult burn care services.

The site includes an interactive patient journey to help young people prepare for their first appointment and explains what the differences are between adult and child services.  There is practical information such as how to get to your local adult burns services, alongside pages dedicated to the adult burn care teams so you can see who the key professionals are within each service and find out a bit about what they do. This is accompanied by inspirational stories from young people about their personal experiences of living with a burn and what it was like for them making the transition to adult care.

The website’s ‘Local Services’ information contains details about the burn care services across the Northern Burn Care Network.  In the future however, it is envisaged that other burn care services can add information about their service to the site, so that ‘Hello Again’ can act as a national resource.

A transition leaflet is also available in the ‘Local Services’ section of the website by clicking one of the services.  It explains what transition is, at what age this usually happens and what to do if they are discharged from services but they need help for burn related problems as an adult in the future.  It can be offered to all young people who are leaving children’s burns services even if they are not moving onto adult care.  It can be downloaded and printed from the website.

To find out more about the Hello-Again transition website, click here: http://hello-again.co.uk/

If you would like information on adult burn support, you can also visit the Adult Burn Support UK website