Every Kid Needs a Safe Space
For paediatric patients, personalizing and making the most of the available space in a hospital room can go a long way in normalizing a foreign and overwhelming situation. Registered Nurse and Quality Analyst Connie Cameron understands the competing priorities between the use of room space and patient safety better than most. Before becoming a nurse, Connie was a long term patient at SickKids, spending 10 years between the ages of eight and 18 in the hospital. Her time as both a patient and an employee at SickKids has allowed her to better appreciate the challenges of making a room feel like home for patients, and fostering an environment where care providers can do bedside procedures in a safe and effective way.
Connie often spent her time at SickKids in her room doing crafts on her bedside table. The playrooms and common hospital areas didn’t appeal to her as much as the familiarity of her own hospital room. To make her room feel more like a home away from home, Connie and her family brought blankets, pillows and decorations for the walls to personalize the space. Doing crafts with glitter, making slime, painting and having familiar personal items stored on the table made her feel a little more comfortable in a foreign space. Problems arose however when care providers needed to do bedside procedures requiring the bedside table as the only available surface to use. Care providers often need a clean environment and surface in order to perform certain procedures, with cleanliness going a long way in decreasing the risk of infection and preventable harm.
Connie went from being a patient at SickKids to being a bedside nurse
What is now important to Connie as a Quality Analyst, is ensuring care providers have everything they need to practice procedures, while balancing the personal needs of patients. For nurses performing central line procedures, such as the dressing change, the patient’s space needs to be cleaned and their personal things moved in order to prepare the environment. The issue is that there isn’t enough supplemental space to put all of the patient’s things. Inevitably, moving a child’s personal items to perform a bedside procedure leads to a greater disconnect between the clinical staff trying to provide the best possible care for their patients.
A key Hospital priority is to find additional surfaces for care providers to complete procedures because in reality the bedside table is not a feasible option. Dedicated procedure carts and other devices are being developed at SickKids, but greater systematic and sustainable change is needed. Connie’s dream for the future of healthcare and SickKids is that there are spaces which allow patients to have a supportive, personalized and welcoming areas like home, but allow the promotion of environmental cleanliness and other key aspects related to patient safety. For SickKids, building for the future ensures that with enough space and the right equipment, one side of the equation doesn’t need to trump the other, instead they can work in synergy to provide holistic care. Connie hopes that this can lead to a greater number of patients having standout hospital experiences like hers, where late at night her nurses would teach her how to throw a football by playing catch in the quiet halls of the unit.
