To The Hospital and Beyond: A Special Program on Child Life and Dialysis

Program Description:  Child Life Specialists (CLS) are members of the health care team who provide support for patients and their family members throughout their hospital journey. Their services and support vary depending on the needs of each individual patient and family that they encounter. CLS have special expertise to educate and work alongside the interdisciplinary team.  Some of their activities include utilizing therapeutic play to allow the child to understand their time in the hospital system,  preparing patients for what they are going to experience in the hospital to promote positive coping, assisting with pain management techniques and how to empower a patient to do difficult tasks in addition to supporting the family throughout this journey.  All these interactions are guided by the CLS’s knowledge of child development.

The goal of this special program is to provide a forum to share information of the roles of Child Life Specialists (CLS) in Nephrology with fellow Nephrology Practitioners and foster an exchange of ideas on how this group of professionals can best support and serve the unique patient population they care for.

8:00-5:00 pm 

Topics and Presentations 

• Hope for Henry: Empowering Children to be Actively Engaged in their Care – Carolyn Fung, CCLS, and Kelly Beck, CCLS

Hope for Henry is a non-profit organization that utilizes incentive-based systems to empower children with serious illnesses to actively participate in their own care.

• Professional Collaboration in Managing Psychosocial Issues in Chronically Ill Children – Cortney Zimmerman, PhD
  • Psychosocial
  • Social Services
  • Child Life Specialists
• Patient Panel: The Patients’ Stories – Robin Davis, CCLS, and Amanda Porter, MS, CCLS
  • Patients from both Texas Children’s and Children’s Mercy in Kansas City will be providing pre-recorded conversations.
• Strategies to Improve Transition to Adult Care – Robin Davis, CCLS
  • Texas Children’s Transition Pathway
• Integrating the Roles of a CLS in Nephrology Care – Amanda Porter, MS, CCLS
  • Defining the different roles of a CLS in Nephrology