Department of Pediatrics participates in national collaborative to improve care of emotional needs for children with chronic illnesses

John Duby, chair of pediatrics at the Boonshoft School of Medicine.

The Department of Pediatrics at the Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine is taking part in an 18-month Roadmap Pilot Collaborative sponsored by the American Board of Pediatrics Foundation. The collaborative is part of the foundation’s Roadmap Initiative, which aims to increase the resilience and emotional health of pediatric patients with chronic conditions and their families.

In 2017, the American Board of Pediatrics Foundation launched the Roadmap Initiative as part of an effort to improve mental health care for children. The initiative’s goal is to increase the resilience and emotional health of children with chronic conditions and their families by raising awareness among patients and families to acknowledge stress and promote self-care; raising awareness among clinical teams to address emotional issues and provide support; and providing resources and connections for clinicians and families.

“Roadmap was proposed by parents on our Family Leadership Committee who identified a critical gap in the care for children with chronic conditions and their families. We are delighted that training programs want to partner to address this gap,” said Laurel Leslie, vice president for research at the American Board of Pediatrics.

The Department of Pediatrics and Dayton Children’s Hospital together represent one of the nine children’s hospitals across the country that have been invited to participate. Quality improvement teams from each hospital are participating in the Roadmap Pilot Collaborative, using methodology adapted from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Breakthrough Series. The improvement methodology relies on collaboration for spreading and adapting new and existing knowledge to multiple settings to accomplish accelerated improvement.

“We are excited to be included in this national groundbreaking effort to learn with our colleagues from across the country, and to inform best practices for supporting the emotional health of children with chronic conditions and their families,” said John Duby, M.D., professor and chair of pediatrics at the Boonshoft School of Medicine.

The children’s hospitals will test strategies for improvement included in the Roadmap Change Package. They will help identify additional strategies and case examples in children’s hospitals that could successfully improve the emotional health and resilience of children with chronic conditions and their families. Strategies could include helping clinicians learn to have conversations with patients and families about their emotional health and offering effective coping interventions, such as connecting patients and families with peer support resources and mindfulness-based strategies.

Hospitals participating in the Roadmap Pilot Collaborative have identified a physician to organize and lead their team, and advocate for change. They are joined by a parent or patient representative and additional team members who are representative of the clinical areas where the teams will be working.

To gauge the effectiveness of the interventions, hospital teams will collect and submit data monthly to assess progress. Teams will gather survey responses each month from a sample of parents of a child with a chronic condition. Parents will be asked how often their child’s care team has talked about things in life that cause stress because of their child’s health care needs. Parents will also be asked how often their child’s care team has offered chances to connect with other families who are going through similar struggles.