The unstoppable heartbeat: Nurses’ crucial role in pediatric heart care
Nurses are often the closest members of the heart care team to a child and their family after heart surgery, making them well-positioned to deliver patient-centered, personalized care. Despite their value, academic training for nursing in many underserved countries does not adequately prepare them for a specialized pediatric cardiac care setting.
The Mary McMahon Busch Nurse Training Fund is dedicated to educating, training and empowering nurses in pediatric cardiac care at Children’s HeartLink partner hospitals. Through our training programs, nurses improve their knowledge, and technical skills and leadership skills to provide high-quality care and improve patient outcomes.
Nurse training and education efforts are designed to achieve three goals.
Improve knowledge and technical skills
Develop nursing leaders
Promote nurses as key team members
Children’s HeartLink has spearheaded several innovations in nursing education and training:
Intensive hands-on Nurse Residency Program in India
The only program of its kind
To improve patient outcomes and increase nurse retention at our partner hospitals in India, we collaborated with US-based nursing experts and international partners to develop an innovative, intensive 10-day, lecture and hands-on Nurse Residency Program providing the foundational knowledge for caring for patients with congenital heart disease in the ICU setting.
This program helps nurses develop their knowledge and nursing practice and take a proactive approach while caring for patients. The train-the-trainer model ensures that other nurses in an institution gain the same skills and confidence as those in the original training.
Virtual Nurse Residency Program
Giving more nurses the opportunity to learn
To give more nurses the opportunity to learn and improve care for their patients through video-based lectures and group meetings, we adapted the Nurse Residency Program to a virtual format in 2022.
Impact: Over 10 months, 32 nurses from four partner hospitals in India and one in Malaysia engaged with our online materials over 2,500 times and with live sessions for 300 hours.
Parent Education Discharge Instructions (PEDI)
Innovations in pre- and post-surgical pediatric care
Created by Children’s HeartLink and its medical volunteers, PEDI is a series of training modules and resources that give caregivers the information and confidence they need to care for a child before and after heart surgery.
We train the nurses at our partner hospitals in PEDI, who then share PEDI with more than 10,000 children and their families every year.
Impact: Published studies have shown nurses have a significant increase in knowledge after completing the PEDI program, and infections at the patient’s surgical site decrease dramatically after nurses complete the program.
Continuing Education in Brazil
Brazil’s first postgraduate nursing program in pediatric cardiac care
Developed by nursing leaders at Hospital da Criança e Maternidade (HCM), Children’s HeartLink’s first Center of Excellence in Brazil, and taught at the hospital-adjacent FAMERP Medical University, this 18-month program offers an in-depth overview of the diagnosis, treatment, management and long-term care of pediatric cardiac patients.
Nurses from across the country attend the program, which is supported by Children’s HeartLink and a multidisciplinary team of experts from HCM, including surgeons, cardiologists, intensivists, nurses and respiratory therapists. Children’s HeartLink provides stipends for some of the nurses from low socio-economic background.
Advanced Practice in Malaysia
A reusable curriculum designed to reach more nurses
In partnership with the Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Society, we piloted their Advanced Practice Provider curriculum course for pediatric cardiac critical care nurses at Institut Jantung Negara, Children’s HeartLink Center of Excellence, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Following this training, the hospital adapted the curriculum and is now teaching it on a regular basis.
Support continuing education for pediatric cardiac care
nurses across the globe.
About the Mary McMahon Busch Nurse Training Fund
We established this fund in memory of our beloved former board member, a cardiac nurse who became an admired and respected leader in the international cardiac device industry. Your gift strengthens and reinforces the clinical skills nurses need to deliver high-quality care for children with heart disease in underserved parts of the world.