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Moving to adult care
 The OCCFN looks after children and teenagers with CF until they are 17 years old. Sometime during their 17th year, teenagers need to move (transition) to an adult unit. For most families in our network, the choice is usually between the adult CF units in Oxford, Leicester or Frimley Park. The main difference in care at an adult centre is that all the care is delivered by the adult unit. This means that teenagers who have previously had most of their care in their local hospitals (at Milton Keynes, Wycombe, Reading, Wexham Park or Northampton) will now have to travel to the adult centre for all care - this includes all outpatient appointments and all inpatient care, including for intravenous antibiotics.
 Transition to an adult service is often a worrying time for many teenagers and their families. Not only do they need to get used to a new CF team, but there are often lots of changes at home to, often with exams, or college and maybe plans for university or moving out of the family home. It is best to get transition to an adult centre done before some of these other changes. To try and reduce the shock of moving to a new team there are 'transition clinics' for teenagers moving the Oxford adult unit which are jointly run by the adult and children's CF teams. This gives an opportunity to meet the adult team members before moving to the adult sevice. We offer appointments to attend transition clinics to teenagers over 14 years of age. We plan for all teenagers to have attended at least 2 transition clinics before moving to the adult service. For teenagers in Northampton moving to the Leicester service, the adult team from Leicester will come a visit Northampton to meet with you. For both Leicester and Frimley Park, visits to the centres can be organised - please ask your local CF teams for help in getting these organised.
Ready Steady Go
The Ready Steady Go transition programme has been developed by a team at Southampton Children's Hospital and provides a framework to help young people gain the knowledge and skills to manage any long term condition - including CF. As a very rough guide, we would aim for young people aged 11-13 years to be at the Ready stage, teenagers aged 14-15 years to be at the Steady stage and teenagers 16 years and over at the Go stage. Everyone is different some people will be more prepared in some aspects of their transition process than others.
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