Featured Resource: Holland Bloorview’s Transitions Guide
By Dr. Jonathan A. Caballero, Strategic Operations Advisor
3-min read
The term “transitions” refers to “life events and experiences marking a movement from one stage, system, or environment to another” that “bring substantial changes to a person’s life.”
In this sense, one might think of experiences such as going from high school to university/college or entering the workforce as examples of life transitions. Their very nature can make them stressful, and they bring additional challenges for youth with disabilities.
This month’s featured resource is Holland’s Bloorview’s Transitions Guide. While it constitutes an excellent and well-tailored resource for professionals working on implementing initiatives that support youth in going through support transitions, we think it can be of interest to changemakers working in various contexts.
This is because it provides deep insights into the use of theories, models, frameworks, and approaches (TMFAs) to guide the development of a guide that can support a wide range of implementation initiatives, analyzes several examples of initiatives in the area, and provides background on its development.
This can be extremely useful for implementation support teams aiming to develop resources to support specific initiatives or even portfolios of related initiatives.
The Guide
The main document available on their website is “Designing solutions for transitions from childhood to adult life for youth with disabilities. A guide for service providers, organizations, and system leaders”.
It introduces the four tenets that have guided their work: Frameworks, Collaboration, Solution-focused approach, and Human-centered design.
We won’t delve into the specifics of each of the tenets here; a dedicated section of the guide is used to introduce them conceptually, offering access to evidence-based resources guiding the principles and providing practical examples of how they can be used to design and support transition-focused initiatives. In doing so, it illustrates how different TMFAs underlie the tenets’ definitions and use.
In addition, the guide provides a detailed account of how the tenets can be implemented using four examples of transition-focused initiatives in areas such as education, employment, and health. These types of clear examples are often sought by implementation professionals working on how to operationalize and use TMFAs and, hence, can be helpful when seeking inspiration regardless of the area of your implementation initiative.
Guidance about the creation of The Guide
It is common to contribute to developing support resources such as guides, handouts, or tools during our quest as changemakers. In these cases, we often draw inspiration from a variety of resources.
Interestingly, it is much less common to understand how the resources were developed.
This is one of the reasons why this month’s featured resource can be so helpful to changemakers working on various initiatives. The document “Transitions Guide Development Process: Our Approach” provides detailed insights into the development of the Transitions Guide, including the project’s background, its methods, and the timelines it went through. All of it is presented in an accessible and actionable way.
Guiding people towards The Guide
Last but not least, the website offers a 2-pager synthesizing the main concepts and highlighting the Transitions Guide's contents (which is close to a hundred pages).
It is a good example of a user-friendly approach to guide people to a more extensive resource, which you may want to consider when producing your implementation support resources.
This being said, I invite you all to explore these resources at https://hollandbloorview.ca/TransitionsGuide.
Note:
In accordance with the CC BY-NC 4.0 license of the documents. Here are the references to the summarized documents and images included in this article:
Evidence to Care & Transitions Strategy. (2023). Designing solutions for transitions from childhood to adult life for youth with disabilities: A guide for service providers, organizations, and system leaders. Toronto, ON: Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. https://hollandbloorview.ca/TransitionsGuide
Evidence to Care. (2023). Transitions Guide Development Process: Our Approach. Toronto, ON: Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. https://hollandbloorview.ca/TransitionsGuide
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