Transition Readiness for Talking With Providers in Urban Youth With Asthma: Associations With Medication Management

Teen readiness assessments may provide a developmental indicator of the transfer of responsibility for health self-management from caregivers to teens. Among urban adolescents with asthma, we aimed to describe teen readiness for talking with providers and identify how readiness relates to responsibility for asthma management, medication beliefs, and clinical outcomes.

Teens and caregivers enrolled in the school-based asthma care for teen's trial in Rochester, NY completed in-home surveys. We classified ready teens as those reporting a score of five on both items of the transition readiness assessment questionnaire talking with providers subscale. We performed bivariate analyses to detect differences between ready teens and other teens in teen- and caregiver-reported responsibility, teen medication beliefs, and clinical outcomes (medication adherence over the past 2 weeks, and healthcare use over the past year).

Among this sample of 251 adolescents (mean age: 13.4 years), 35% were classified as "Ready." Ready teens were more likely than other teens to want to use a controller medication independently (7.6 vs. 6.5 out of 10, p < .01) and to have confidence in this ability (8.4 vs. 7.6 out of 10, p = .02). Teens reported poor adherence (missed 52.9% of prescribed controller doses), with no differences in responsibility or clinical outcomes based on level of teen readiness for talking with providers.

In urban adolescents with poorly controlled asthma, a higher level of teen readiness for talking with providers is associated with higher perceptions of independence in medication taking, but does not appear to relate to clinical outcomes.