Grant: Planning Grants - Priority Announcement: HIV/AIDS

Kids born with HIV are now able to grow up into young adults, and as a result have to move from pediatric to adult care. The process of preparing a teenager to make the move to an adult clinic, and then the move itself, is referred to as "transition". Teens and the medical teams who look after them are finding this process difficult. Many teens no longer continue to see their doctors regularly, stop taking medications, and have more medical problems after they leave their pediatric clinic. This problem is common among many chronic conditions for children, but the issues of HIV stigma and disclosure make it hard to take what is known from transition research on other pediatric diseases and apply it to HIV infected kids. In 2011, the Canadian Perinatal HIV Surveillance Project found that one third of Canadian pediatric HIV patients will have to move to adult care in the next 3 years. Given the concerns identified by all care providers, there is an urgent need to find out what is happening after they have left pediatric care, in order to determine the best way to make the transition to adult care. The planning grant meeting will 1) bring together researchers, health care providers (pediatricians, adult care providers, nurses, social workers), community agencies, and HIV infected teens from across the country, 2) gather information on how providers at different centers currently approach transition, and 3) gather information regarding ongoing research projects at each center. The meeting will establish 1) how to develop a collaborative group effort to study the process of transition, 2) the feasibility of rapidly establishing a cohort in order to capture the large volume of teens expected to transition imminently 3) how to merge ongoing projects, and 4) possible future intervention studies related to transition. The research team would be uniquely positioned to answer these priority questions and to implement any potential interventions.