What is it really like to be a Young Person, in Our Hospital, at This Moment?

摘要

The (slightly adapted) title for this opinion piece conies from a commentary by Sebastian Kraemer. Fifty years on from the Platt Report that influenced the way we work in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, Kraemer edited a paper given by the late Sydney Brandon in 1986 at the 20th anniversary Conference of the National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital (now Action for Sick Children a Children's Healthcare Charity in the United Kingdom; http://actionforsickchildren.org.uk/). This paper traced the history of increasing interest in children's welfare and parental presence in hospitals, a pathway described by Davies as one from exclusion, to toleration and parental participation in the care of the hospitalized child. "What seemed normal 50 years ago would now be regarded as naive, yet how will we view current practice 50 years hence"? What I would like to argue here is that there will be a significant difference in the "before and after stories" if we were to trace a similar history in the care of adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with cancer in hospital. Unlike the reporting of the care of hospitalized children that has focused in the main on parents' perspectives, over the next 50 years the voice of the young person will dominate with respect to patient experience, service development, delivery, and evaluation (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/2l6852/CYP-report.pdf).