Comfort Items for Kentucky Children's Hospital Child Life

With support from the enCourage Kids Foundation, we plan to roll out a new Comfort Program within Kentucky Children’s Hospital to support child life activities within the pediatric emergency department, intensive care unit, and Children’s Sedation and Procedure Unit (CSPU). Children in these settings often undergo procedures like blood product administration or lab draws, infusions, nasogastric tube placement, catheter placement, and other procedures that can be frightening and uncomfortable. By providing comfort items, we hope that patients can find a bit of relief and distraction from their circumstances. We plan to purchase two varieties of comfort items for each of our ten units: Buzzy Bees, small ice packs that vibrate to ease the pain of a blood draw or infusion site and shot blockers, small devices that activate the nerves around an injection site to distract from the pain of a needle. We’d like to provide distraction items, like badge cards with puzzles, matching or seek-and-find games and a variety of distraction toys. With these funds, we also hope to print education cards for parents and guardians with information on available comfort items, like the Buzzy Bees, shot blockers, numbing cream, and more. We also plan to provide posters to hang in patient rooms and nurses'' stations with information about comfortable positioning for patients when receiving injections. All items will be available in Spanish and English.