Procedure Preparation Curated Collection

This video teaches practical strategies that adults can use to prepare a child for a medical procedure such as a heart surgery, catheterization, or inpatient stay.

This article and the attached resources guide families in preparing for a hospital stay, including both practical preparation and emotional preparation.

This resource leads parents through the process of preparing a child for a hospital admission, and includes links to numerous helpful tools.

Parents often dread explaining a diagnosis to a child. This guide helps parents through the process, and can help bring the whole family to a place of better mutual understanding.

Children with congenital heart defects (CHDs) often develop anxiety surrounding medical care. This video explains how to help them to feel calmer and safer.

Children with heart defects and their siblings often feel high levels of anxiety, especially surrounding hospitalizations and procedures. Therapy can help them to feel calmer and more in control.

Parenting a child with a chronic illness can be stressful, or even overwhelming. When parents manage their own mental health well, they are better able to be present and engaged for their children.

These resources can help families to find an appropriate and accessible therapist to help them to work through the complicated feelings and thoughts that can come from a child's hospitalization.

This resource helps families and providers to plan for a child's hospitalization, and to make sure the child is able to remain as interested and busy as possible.

This resource describes advanced care treatments, which may be offered to children in heart failure. Understanding these treatments and available supports can help families to feel in control and more relaxed.

Sometimes, children with complex congenital heart defects (CHDs) receive a treatment called extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). This resource explains the treatment, and describes how families can continue to care for their child during the treatment.

This collection of books, videos, and websites can help children understand mental health, and learn strategies to feel better. They can help kids preparing for a procedure to gain more control over any feelings of anxiety, sadness, or fear.

This collection of books, videos, and websites can help children to understand their or their sibling's genetic diagnosis. As children prepare for a procedure, understanding their diagnosis can help them to feel agency and mastery.

This collection of books, videos, and websites can help children of all ages to better understand congenital heart defects (CHDs), and to feel seen and validated in their experience of living with a chronic illness. Understanding their diagnosis can help kids to feel more in control, and can help them to grasp the purpose behind procedures.

These resources can help many families to organize and keep track of medical information, which can help them to feel confident and controlled in preparing for a medical procedure.

School-age children in the Unites States have a right to free home/hospital instruction if they have more than 14 medical absences in a school year. This article explains how to obtain this vital public educational services.

Many children feel elevated anxiety when they or a sibling are preparing for a medical procedure. This resources helps parents better understand the nature of this anxiety, and how to manage it.

This resource guides parents in helping their children to cope with anxiety, and knowing where and how to seek professional help if needed.

This collection of resources can help parents to support healthy siblings of children with congenital heart defects (CHDs).

Developmental Care is a set of practices that can optimize the functioning and development of hospitalized babies and young children. Families and providers can use the principles of Developmental Care to support children of any age and their parents throughout a hospitalization.

Before a child's medical procedure, families can work to build a social support network to share and lessen the burden. These resources make that process easier.

Coping with a child's illness is easier when family members are not trying to get through it alone. This resource helps families to connect with an understanding and supportive community.

This resource helps families know what to expect in a cardiac intensive care unit (CICU).

This video shows families what they will see and experience in a cardiac intensive care unit (CICU).

This video brings viewers on a virtual tour of a cardiology floor at Boston Children's Hospital, and shows them what an inpatient room looks like.

This set of videos explores how families and providers can establish trusting, equitable relationships, and share decisions as partners in guiding a child's care.

Many children are afraid of the needles involved in healthcare. This video helps caregivers to reduce children's fear, and to help them to manage shots, blood draws, and IVs more calmly.

Unfortunately, children sometimes experience pain as a result of their illness or associated treatment. These strategies can help families to better manage pain, so that it can interfere less with children's lives and wellbeing.

Pediatric palliative care is NOT the same thing as hospice care, and it can be a vital long-term support for families who have a child with a congenital heart defect (CHD). Palliative care providers can help advocate for families, and provide services and supports that center a child's holistic wellbeing.

This resource helps parents feel confident that they can support their child's mental health before, during, and after a hospitalization or medical procedure.

Sometimes, children resist medical treatment, even though they need the treatment to stay well or to recover. These strategies can help children to more readily go along with medical treatments.

Many children struggle to swallow medicine, which can make treatment more difficult, and can force providers to consider options that involve needles. This video explains strategies for teaching children how to safely and successfully swallow oral medicines.

Child Life specialists offer a critical service to hospitalized children and their families, providing comfort, amusement, and emotional support. Learn how to make the most of Child Life's services.

This resource teaches comfort positions, which are ways of holding a child during medical treatment to help them feel safe and calm.

Many pediatric hospitals offer music therapy, which can bring joy, learning, and relaxation to hospitalized children and their families.

This article guides families through the process of a heart transplant, and helps them learn strategies and find resources to make the experience as easy as possible.

Sometimes, children with heart defects require treatment with a ventricular assist device (VAD). This article explains what to expect, and how to support children throughout VAD treatment.

These two videos walk families through the process of undergoing an MRI, so that the process is familiar and not frightening.

This short video shows a day in the life of a cardiac surgery nurse. Watching it can help to relieve anxiety in children and parents preparing for a heart surgery.

This video explains to families what they should expect after a biventricular repair surgery.