Blythedale Children’s Hospital empowers parents, caregivers using innovative simulation training
For parents and caregivers of medically fragile infants or children, ensuring safe discharge and moving primary caretaking into the home setting can be daunting. Blythedale Children’s Hospital’s Parent and Family Education Program divides what initially seems like an overwhelming learning curve into tiny steps for their patients’ families. The program enables families to practice with expert supervision in a supportive setting and feel confident heading home. It also helps ease the critical shortage of home care providers trained in such complex care.
Blythedale’s team of specially trained nurse educators and respiratory therapists customizes education to match the unique variables impacting each patient’s care — diagnosis, acuity and reliance on medical technology and life support — with the level of support required for a safe discharge home.
For most parents, the road home begins with their child’s admission to Blythedale. They learn to give their infant a bath for the first time or change their outfit amid tubing and breathing apparatus. Training often starts at the bedside and expands to include the hospital's Parent and Caregiver Training Center and state-of-the-art Simulation Lab. In the Sim Lab, clinical educators use high-tech medical mannequins to teach parents how to provide tracheostomy care and enteral feeding, use a central line, administer medications and more. They are trained to calmly and competently respond to alarms signaling distress and provide life-saving interventions if needed.
In this safe, controlled setting, caregivers not only become familiar with specialized medical equipment and monitoring devices but also become experts in their use. Additionally, parents are trained in a simulated nursery so they can envision how to organize their child’s medical equipment and supplies prior to their homecoming. While their lives may have taken an unexpected trajectory, Blythedale’s Parent and Family Education program ensures that the future remains bright and filled with hope.
In addition to conceptualizing the Parent and Family Education Program, Blythedale’s chief nursing officer, Jill Wegener, is taking steps to scale the program to ease the shortage of people trained to provide such complex pediatric home care in the community. The goal is to extend this specialized training to home care providers and EMS workers.
In 2024, the hospital’s Parent and Family Education team provided the following support:
- trained 192 families;
- trained 380 individuals;
- nursing and respiratory therapy provided 1,476 training sessions; and
- trained five nursing schools and 67 students.
For more information, contact Jill Wegener, MSN, RN, chief nursing officer, Blythedale Children's Hospital, at jwegener@blythedale.org or 914.831.2588.
