Adolescence is a unique period of human development during which physical, cognitive, and psychosocial growth occurs. Health care services for adolescents are needed to ensure that these changes have a positive impact on health and quality of life.
Health care for adolescents includes services for prevention of disease and disorders, the treatment of common illnesses and injuries, and the promotion of healthy lifestyles. Many advances have occurred in recent years that improve the effectiveness of care and enhance patient satisfaction. These include improvements in the quality and availability of primary care, the use of evidence-based preventive guidelines, and the adoption of new health care delivery models such as patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs).
Accessibility of Adolescent Care is critical. Barriers to care for adolescents often include lack of transportation, long distances to services, and high waiting times. This is especially true for disadvantaged groups such as homeless adolescents, sex workers, and adolescents who are in the foster care system. In addition, adolescents with special health care needs, including those in families that have recently immigrated to the United States or who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT), rely on safety-net centers for their health care.
A number of national and state quality measures exist that assess the adequacy and effectiveness of health care for adolescents. These measures have been developed to provide an objective measurement of health service quality and can serve as a guide for developing or improving the Adolescent Care Services. These include the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS),4 a national set of 81 disease-specific measures that can be used to evaluate practice quality in the adolescent population.5,6,7 However, HEDIS outcomes are not universal and may not accurately measure adolescent health status and the quality of care. Therefore, adolescent health care providers and those in charge of the health care system should be encouraged to adopt HEDIS as a means of monitoring and improving adolescent care.
Reporting of adolescent use and access to health services
Most surveys on the adequacy of adolescent health care are based on parental report, and this may underestimate the extent to which adolescents can access care for themselves. The majority of adolescent use surveys also do not measure knowledge and use of confidential services for mental health or reproductive needs.
In this study, we surveyed 259 adolescents between the ages of 14 and 19 to determine their knowledge and use of confidential services for mental health and reproductive issues. We asked them to name their regular sources of care and identify problems for which they would seek help from these sources.
Physicians were the most frequently named source of primary care, followed by health centers and hospital clinics. They were also identified by adolescents as places they would go for a bad sore throat, sports injury, a possible STD, information about AIDS, and obtaining birth control. For mental health and substance abuse, alcohol and drug abuse counseling agencies were the most commonly mentioned sources of care. Find out more about this topic on this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolescent_health.