What If Care Starts With Heart At Home for Medically Complex Children?

An exploration of a core value shift that might underpin a more compassionate healthcare experience for the future.

“This sequence of increasingly complex geometrical figures and perspective drawings — collected in a sixteenth-century watercolor manuscript and preserved at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel — comes with no author’s note, editor’s preface, or running commentary. We know very little about its origins. All we have are shapes and color, with the occasional totem (eagle, rooster, and even a putto holding something like a pinwheel) dwarfed by the immensity of lines and angles.” Source via Public Domain Review

By Kelli Mullen Brown and Shannon Mullen O’Keefe

What is at the heart of health care?

Life.

Or put another way, keeping us alive.

Children, perhaps, are those we pursue life for with the most determination.

Fueled by parents’ love and physician researchers’ willingness to innovate, children with life-limiting conditions and those coping with serious-illness like cancer are living longer, and in some cases overcoming diseases which would have once claimed their lives.

In the past twenty years, the prognosis for preterm infants has improved significantly, and during that time childhood cancer survival rates have continuously increased. Children with rare diseases are gaining more therapeutic treatments every year too. These human beings at the dawn of their lives are living longer. When we love someone, like we do these children, we want them to stay and live well. So we pursue treatments and technologies that enable this.