Being at home... when you're a child and you're recovering

It’s not much fun being confined to your home. But everyone who’s in a hospital wants to go home, especially children: hospitals are strange places (in spite of the incredible improvements the hospitals have made and all their hard work) and your family can’t always come into your room (or stay for as long as you’d like them to). Paediatric home hospitalization is an excellent alternative: you are well looked after at home and healthcare professionals can come and visit you on a regular basis. The home transfer is planned and organized by the hospital together with your family without putting your health at risk. Sometimes, this type of care requires medical devices which can monitor you (they let the doctors and nurses back at the hospital see how you’re doing, so they can take care of you), and they make it easier for your family to contact the hospital if they need to. Obviously, the families involved need to be comfortable with the technology: with how it works, and feel that it’s safe and easy to use.

In response to this need, Sant Joan de Déu and the Fundació TIC Salut Social carried out a joint study to find out how satisfied families are with the paediatric telemonitoring program. The result is clear: everyone involved would happily do it again and rate all the “gadgets” (tablet, thermometer, pulse oximeter, digital scale and blood pressure monitor) very highly, though they did mention that they aren’t always the right size for a child. In addition, they reported that it caused very few problems. It’s important we leave it up to the doctors to decide who can leave hospital and when, so that everything turns out OK.

Sometimes home is the best place to be. When technology gives us the opportunity, we should make the most of it.