Adolescent Health

The Adolescent Health Clinic is a specialized clinic that serves youth from 12 to 18 years of age with complex health issues during their transition to adulthood.

Adolescent medicine consultations

The Adolescent Health Clinic takes a whole-person approach to care. We offer comprehensive adolescent medicine consultations with an adolescent medicine specialist pediatrician and an adolescent health nurse clinician. We provide ongoing follow-up for youth with complex health needs. We aim to help youth move successfully towards healthy adulthood.

If needed, we help youth connect with other professionals and services, and with the transition to adult health care.

Mindfulness Awareness and Resilience Skills for Adolescence (MARS-A)

Mindfulness-based clinical interventions teach mindfulness meditation skills. They have been shown to help youth cope with chronic stress, pain, and mood symptoms.

MARS-A is an eight-week outpatient training program to educate youth aged 15 to 19 on mindfulness skills to cope with psychological distress, including depression and anxiety symptoms, chronic pain, and chronic stress.

MARS-A is a partnership between Adolescent Medicine and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at BC Children's Hospital.

For more general information on mindfulness for children and youth, including a short video, visit the BC Children's Hospital Centre for Mindfulness.

Adolescent medicine services in other clinical programs

In addition to providing dedicated care through the Adolescent Health Clinic, the doctors in the Division of Adolescent Health and Medicine provide medical staffing in other clinical programs at BC Children's Hospital. See the Division of Adolescent Health and Medicine's web page for further information.

Teaching and research

The Adolescent Health Clinic is also a teaching and research site of the Division of Adolescent Health and Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, University of British Columbia (UBC).

Patients may receive care from UBC medical trainees, including adolescent medicine subspecialty residents or fellows, pediatric residents, medical students, and others, under the supervision of faculty from the Division of Adolescent Health and Medicine.

Referral information

Adolescent Health Clinic referrals

We accept referrals from general pediatricians, pediatric subspecialists, pediatric subspecialty nurse practitioners and psychiatrists.

We may offer telephone or telehealth consultations with providers instead of face-to-face consultations with youth and their families or caregivers based on patient needs.

MARS-A referrals

We accept referrals from any medical or mental health provider for the MARS-A (Mindful Awareness and Resilience Skills for Adolescents) group.

See our Adolescent Health Referral page for details on referrals.

Appointment details

Typically, the first appointment will be approximately 90 minutes. We see youth privately and with their families, caregivers, or support people. We strive to encompass youth-friendly and family-centred care.

We take a whole-person approach to care. We may talk to youth about friendships, dating, school, family, sexuality, jobs, home life, sleep, eating, health conditions, social activities, drugs, stress, mood and worries, among other topics. We do not share what we talk about with youth privately with anyone outside of their care team, without the youth’s permission.

We hope that this helps youth to feel safe in talking to us about personal and sensitive topics. There are a few situations in which we have to share information and/or intervene for a youth's safety, including:

The youth is at risk of killing themselves.
The youth is at risk of seriously hurting someone else.
We are concerned that any youth may have been abused or neglected by an adult.
There is a legal or court order for the youth’s medical records.

Adolescents may make health decisions on their own, or with their parents or caregivers, depending on their ability to make health decisions and on the decisions being made.

Our team aims to work with youth to help them reach healthy adulthood. If needed, we can help with the transition to adult services.

After the first visit

The youth and their parent or caregiver decide on follow-up visits at the end of their first appointment. You can make follow-up appointments at the end of each visit, or by emailing or calling us.

Typically, we see youth a few times for one-hour appointments. We then help youth find longer-term support in their community if they need it. However, this varies for each person. If a youth needs more or fewer appointments, we do our best to accommodate that.