Our Journey with Heart Surgery

The Emily Center at Phoenix Children’s Hospital presents Our JourneyTM with Heart Surgery as a tool to help families of children needing a heart surgery identify what they need to know before taking their child home from the hospital. Parts of this app may also be applied to a clinic or emergency room visit.

When a child is in the hospital, parents can be overwhelmed by nurses and doctors rushing around, speaking medical jargon. Sometimes health care providers think they are clearly communicating, but don’t check to make sure you understand their instructions. If you are able to teach back the information in your own words, you can be confident you do understand.

The Our JourneyTM with Heart Surgery app is designed to: — Be used from the time of admission throughout hospitalization, to facilitate conversations between families and the health care team. — Help parents identify what they need to know before going home. — Give parents a safe way to admit what they don’t know or understand, and ask questions. — Cue families on what they need to teach back to or demonstrate for their nurse or doctor. This gives the health care provider an opportunity to confirm information and skills and correct misunderstandings. — Help families feel confident that they can safely care for their child at home after discharge from the hospital, know the signs of possible problems, and know how to respond.

About The Emily Center at Phoenix Children’s Hospital: Founded in 1990, the Center is named after Emily Anderson. Emily fought a rare form of leukemia for four years before losing her battle a few days before her seventh birthday.

Frustrated by the lack of easy to understand information about Emily’s illness, her parents founded The Emily Center so that families of sick children would always have access to pediatric health information that is accurate, easy to understand, and free of charge to Arizona’s families. http://www.emilycenter.org and on Twitter @emilycenter

The Our JourneyTM with Heart Surgery mobile app has been funded by a grant from Cox.