Sick kids get to MoVE in groundbreaking scheme
PIONEERING work at Glasgow’s Royal Hospital for Children (RHC) is helping parents and children on life support machines share special family milestones for the first time.
Parents are now being given the opportunity to enjoy precious first time experiences with their seriously ill children as a result of work at the hospital – the only work of its kind in the UK.
The hospitals’ Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) is the only one in the UK working with its patients – many of them on ventilators – and their families to embrace early movement.
Parents have been able to spend time with their child outside for the first time or get their first family photo where the child isn’t confined to bed.
The Move on Ventilation Early (MoVE) programme was a year in the planning with the aim of tackling Intensive Care Unit (ICU) acquired weakness that can quickly affect seriously ill patients confined to a hospital bed.
In addition to having children moving sooner, the aim is for MoVE to lead to shorter stays on general wards once patients have been transferred from PICU due to a lower prevalence of ICU acquired weakness.
Jenna Hills, highly specialist physiotherapist at the RHC, attended a conference in Baltimore last year to learn more about the work hospitals in North America were doing in tackling ICU acquired weakness in children.
Jenna said: “Parents whose children have been treated in the unit before and after we started MoVE say they see a big improvement in their children after taking part.
“It’s also hugely beneficial for parents as they are more involved in their child’s care and play an important role in deciding which activities the children participate in.
“Parents are now carrying out more than 50% of the activities which is great as it means they are now having more hands-on engagement with their children which they couldn’t always do in the past.
“There is widespread recognition of the risks of ICU acquired weakness in adult patients such as muscle weakness and psychological trauma during long stays, however there is a lot less knowledge in the UK when it comes to children.”
Glasgow Children’s Hospital Charity provided £17,000 of funding to Jenna Hills and the MoVE project. The funding was used to buy a bed-bike that children can use while lying down in PICU and was the first use of a bed-bike in a paediatric hospital in the UK.
The charity also funded the portable monitoring system for staff to take children out of the PICU ward.
This system allows staff to monitor a patient’s breathing and oxygen levels from anywhere in the hospital and lets them to take children outside for walks and exercise safely.
Jenna added: “We spent more than a year developing MoVE and worked with every single discipline involved in PICU to ensure that every service involved in patient care had an input into the new way of working to ensure patients got the maximum benefit.
“We’re the only PICU doing this kind of work in the UK and have already been approached by children’s hospitals in Nottingham, Leicester and Belfast looking to learn from our experience.
“The MoVE initiative has made a big difference to the health of a number of our patients and that has only been possible thanks to the ongoing full support of all the PICU staff.”