The Children’s Hospital Association has shared a compelling story about Golisano Children’s Hospital at UK in Lexington, Ky., which integrated a child life specialist into its perioperative team. While the expectation was that the integration of the specialist would help improve the patient experience, it also changed clinical practice by nearly halving the use of preoperative sedation for children undergoing surgery.
The shift is attributed to the specialist helping to lower the children’s anxiety, which in turn altered anesthesia assessments in many cases.
The full-time certified child life specialist was dedicated to perioperative services with the goal of strengthening pediatric support across the surgical journey. According to the Children’s Hospital Association, the specialist trained nurses, surgeons, anesthesiologists, and OR technicians on how anxiety presents across developmental stages, the power of language choices, strategies to help patients cope during IV starts and anesthesia induction, and techniques that maintain a child’s sense of control.
“The goal was not to replace clinical workflows but to strengthen them with pediatric-specific expertise,” says the association.
Read much more about the impact the child life specialist made on Golisano Children’s entire perioperative team and its pediatric patients here.
