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INTRODUCTION Transitional care is an NHS priority with newly published NICE guidance. Many paediatric surgical patients need quality care to continue into adulthood. We undertook an evaluation of our departmental activity to assess the magnitude of this issue. METHODS We identified all outpatients ≥ 15 years (potentially requiring imminent transition) seen over a 12 month period for all five general paediatric surgery consultants in our tertiary centre. Those patients requiring transition were highlighted and the appropriate adult team for referral recorded. RESULTS There were 2989 general paediatric surgery clinic appointments within the year; 289 (9.7%) were for young people aged 15 years or older; 62 patients (28% of those ≥ 15years) were deemed to require transition into adult care. Significantly more patients having colorectal surgery required follow-up (P = 0.0009 Chi-square test) compared with patients in other subspecialties. CONCLUSIONS More patients than expected required transition. This may be the case in other units. Current best practice includes time intensive preclinic planning, careful preparation of patient and family, followed by joint clinics. A joint clinic appointment takes 30 minutes, allowing for comprehensive handover and forging new relationships. In our department, we need at least ten transition clinics across 2 years. Coalition with adult colleagues is vital. These data enable us to plan services to provide quality care for our adolescent patients and highlights colorectal surgery as a priority.

Organic quenched Geiger counters can be made with fillings at near atmospheric pressure which permits the use of large area (250 cm2), thin (7 mg/cm2) windows. This construction facilitates the detection of low energy (0.3 MeV maximum energy) beta emitters spread over hands and shoes.These counters have a limited life (-lo* counts) but this limitation has been overcome by biassing them only during the counting process, minimising the counting period and reducing the background with 25 mm of lead shielding.The monitor employs such counters for detecting permissible levels (0.1 nCi/cm2 over 300 cm2 for p-emitters of maximum energy 0.3 MeV or more) on hands or shoes. For contamination on other surfaces, such as the face, clothes or tools, a similar but smaller (50 cmz) counter is mounted into the probe.A simple system of indicator lamps is used to show the presence or absence of excessive contamination. When contamination is detected its level can be estimated with a digital display count rate meter (0-2000 counts/sec).

36 37 Background: Analysing variant antigen gene families on a population scale is a 38 difficult challenge for conventional methods of read mapping and variant calling due 39 to the great variability in sequence, copy number and genomic loci. In African 40 trypanosomes, hemoparasites of humans and animals, this is complicated by variant 41 antigen repertoires containing hundreds of genes subject to various degrees of 42 sequence recombination. Findings: We introduce Variant Antigen Profiler 43 (VAPPER), a tool that allows automated analysis of variant antigen repertoires of 44 African trypanosomes. VAPPER produces variant antigen profiles for any isolate of 45 the veterinary pathogens Trypanosoma congolense and Trypanosoma vivax from 46 genomic and transcriptomic sequencing data and delivers publication-ready figures 47 that show how the queried isolate compares with a database of existing strains.