UK - Story Templates

Millions of children in the US alone have a complex medical condition that requires several medical appointments each year. In addition to the physical health consequences associated with their medical condition, frequent and ongoing medical treatments and procedures can impact children’s mental and emotional health and result in significant symptoms of medical trauma. Medical teams are often too under-resourced (i.e. lack of time, lack of psychosocial staff) to implement procedures and interventions focused on optimizing patient’s mental health. However, social stories, once developed, can be easily implemented by pediatric psychologists as an intervention that can reduce distress related to medical appointments. Social stories are short stories that depict and explain a specific social situation, as well as teach appropriate social behaviors, and are often tailored to the child’s specific needs. Within the medical setting, social stories can be utilized to provide children with expectations about regular medical appointments, procedures, and treatments, which can ultimately reduce and prevent distress, anxiety, and medical trauma. The goal of the proposed grant is to develop social story templates that can then be tailored to individual pediatric patients with Cystic Fibrosis, cancer, and cardiac conditions to reduce and prevent distress, anxiety, and trauma related to ongoing complex medical care, treatments, and procedures. The initial development of these story templates and supplies will allow us to collect pilot data on satisfaction and utility of social stories for three complex medical populations in order to determine if social story interventions should be applied more broadly throughout medical care at our institution.