What Else? The Basics and Beyond for Effective Consultations with Youth with Special Healthcare Needs

Youth with special healthcare needs (YSHCN) require medical support for disease management and equally require that providers be responsive to their ever-changing and sometimes unique psychosocial and developmental needs. This paper reviews the fundamentals of adolescent consultation reminding the reader that YSHCN are, after all, still youth with the same basic needs as their healthy peers. Beyond the basics, consultations with this population are characterized by complexities which are best managed by providers who can nimbly adjust their clinical stance. In non-urgent clinical scenarios, clinicians can adopt a coaching stance which we introduce and expand upon in this paper. Characterized by the five elements of non-judgment, curiosity, empathy, openness, and flexibility, the coaching stance can be adopted without specific training. We demonstrate its application using TGROW (Topic, Goal, Reality, Options and Wrap Up), a coaching framework that holds promise for use in clinical settings. Consultants may consider incorporating the coaching stance and TGROW into their practice repertoire, as both may be particularly helpful when consulting with adolescents with chronic illness.