Basic HTML Version
dialogue
22
NOV / DEC 2014
I
Healthcare Journal of new orleans
Chief Editor Smith W. Hartley
What does it
mean to the city of New Orleans to have a
standalone children’s hospital?
Mary Perrin
You know a children’s hospital is a
real gem to any community. I feel like we are
lucky in Louisiana to have Children’s Hos-
pital here. It’s a place where children are the
priority in terms of healthcare. We have all
the specialists, the full scope, and children
are not just little people. I know healthcare
providers say that all the time when we talk
about children’s healthcare, but there was a
recent article, I think in the
Wall Street Jour-
nal
, that talked about how important it was
and how when children have surgery and
there’s a pediatric anesthesiologist, there
are far fewer complications. The complica-
tion rate goes way down. It’s because they
are different.
So we feel like we appreciate those differ-
ences and we have all sorts of things here
that are not even found at adult hospitals,
like play therapists, child therapy, and music
therapists. We staff differently. At an adult
hospital when you need a respiratory treat-
ment, the respiratory therapist comes to the
bed and says, “I am going to squirt this medi-
cine in this thing. Breathe in 20 times, I’ll be
back in 15 minutes.” At a children’s hospi-
tal, you sit there, you put the mask over the
child and you say, “Okay, breathe in. Okay,
breathe out” and you do it 20 times because
you can’t just say, “I’ll be back in 15 minutes,
do this for yourself.”
So it is really very different. Despite the
fact we all might get sick with similar diag-
noses, children need to be treated differently.
Editor
Can you elaborate a little more on
how children are treated differently at a
children’s hospital?
Mary Perrin
Children are different when they
have very serious illnesses and the easy
example is pediatric cancer. That’s a devas-
tating diagnosis to anybody who is told they
have cancer, but for children it’s scary and
they might not manifest their fears and con-
cerns in the same way as an adult. So we have
a team that is skilled in how children respond
and what needs to happen in order to be able
to understand and communicate and console
them very differently from adults. We have
psychologists who are on the team, we have
the child life therapists. We reward them for
going through various stages, like when they
get the central line, when they get their first
dose of chemo. It’s scary to adults and it’s real
scary to children. We understand what the
child is going through. We understand that
there’s also the parent that we are treating.
Maybe not physically, but it’s a whole family
thing when a child has a serious or chronic
disease. So we accommodate all that. A lot