Ideas That Work: Help Keep Anxious Parents Calm

Practical pearls from your colleagues

When a child is scheduled for a surgical procedure — even a quick and routine tympanostomy or tonsillectomy — the experience can leave parents rife with anxiety. To help quell their fears, Nemours Children’s Hospital in Wilmington, Delaware, provides a way to track their child’s progress.

Parents can easily monitor their child’s surgical journey in real time by viewing the monitors in the waiting room. The child’s location is color-coded and changes as their journey progresses, making it easy to follow along (green means a child is currently in the operating room, for example). To protect the family’s privacy, the facility gives each child an identifying case number, which makes it easy for parents to distinguish their child from the other patients and keep track of their location and status. OSM