Hello and welcome back to the blog! Today we are going to talk about pediatrics and how the care personnel at hospitals can prepare little patients and their families for surgery. Before that, you might want to have a look at our previous posts on pediatrics here and here to get a gist of why this field is so important to us and what we've achieved.
Preparing small patients and their entire family for surgery is slightly different compared to working with adult patients. In pediatrics, there usually are more fears, anxiety, and stress before the operation. Therefore, we prepared a list of the issues to be considered in the pediatric surgery care path:
- Easy-to-understand instructions: the easier it is to digest the information provided by the hospital, the less confusion and obscurity there will be during the process.
- Checklists: Checklists make it easy for families to focus on those instructions that are essential at the particular time. Studying how families interact with the checklists (i.e. via a digital tool) also provides some vital information for care personnel that helps to identify the families that have not, for example, read and acknowledged the checklists which may cause some problematic issues.
- Reminders: Receiving timely reminders keeps the family on track. In the best case scenario, reminders can reduce surgery cancellations and delays as the family knows where to be and at what time.
- Education during and after surgery: When the patient is in the operating theater, it is the most nerve-racking time for the family. Thus, it’s important to let the parents know how the surgery is progressing and that everything is going as planned. Moreover, the parents should know what to expect after the procedure and who to contact in case something is unclear. The better the post-operative instructions are communicated, the more confident the family feels when managing the recovery themselves.
- Post-operative monitoring: It’s equally important to continue the care after the surgery. Care personnel should collect the data on how the patients are progressing and staying on track according to the recovery plan. Care staff can then use this information to identify those patients that might need e.g. follow-up appointments. As we wrote in the previous post, some deviations from the baseline should be analyzed and addressed.
Have a quick read on how we solve all these challenges in hospitals with our BuddyCare solution here.
Please let us know if we missed something essential from our list. Feel free to leave your comments below or contact care@buddyhealthcare.com. Thanks for your feedback and stay in touch!
