Cardiac Care Coordination Service

[Virtual Presenter] Hello, this is a quick video to explain our cardiac coordination service and how we work together to give your child the best outcome for their cardiac health. Whether you know us already or are completely new to cardiac, we hope this information will help relieve some of the stress and anxiety you may be feeling and answer some of the 'where to next' questions you may have..

[Audio] Our Cardiac care coordination service is headed by a clinical nurse consultant and run by a group of senior cardiac clinical nurses. We work in conjunction with your cardiologist for a teamwork approach to your child's care. We may help plan your child's needs for discharge from hospital, see you in cardiac outpatient appointments or provide telephone advice to maintain cardiac health and reduce your hospital visits..

[Audio] There are several ways for you to contact us. We have a voicemail number and an email address that you can leave your message and it will be sent to the relevant care coordinator to get back in touch with you. It is important that you state your child's name, date of birth, cardiologist and the reason for your contact, as this helps us work out the timeframe to contact you back. These services are monitored Monday to Friday between 8am and 4pm..

[Audio] In broad terms, any urgent or sudden clinical concerns, contact Triple Zero if applicable, or attend your GP or local paediatric emergency department for assessment. Any persistent, already discussed chronic symptoms that are worsening, or symptoms that appear only transiently, can be discussed with us. We can talk over symptoms with your child's cardiologist to assess if your child's review timeframe needs to be adjusted or add management suggestions to improve the situation. If you have been given a specific reporting pathway by your cardiologist for particular concerns, please refer to this instead. We cannot assess your child's health over the phone, so we will always direct you to seek face to face medical attention for urgent symptoms, as potentially not all symptoms your child experiences will be from a cardiac source. Any general childhood illness concerns should be raised with your local GP or paediatrician..

[Audio] When your child gets discharged, your child may be linked into certain services provided by the hospital. One of these may be the cardiac feeding clinic, which is managed by our dieticians and speech pathologists, to monitor and help keep our patients growing outside of the hospital ward. An appointment with this clinic will be arranged by this team and can be face to face or via the telephone. If your child is requiring feeding support with the use of a feeding pump, you will be introduced by the ward staff to the clinical resource service or CRS for short, situated on level 2 here in QCH or through your local hospital consumable service. This is where you will pick up your monthly supplies such as naso-gastric tubes, tape, testing strips and adhesive remove wipes. Parents need to contact CRS three days prior to the date they want to collect their child's order. CRS is open from 7am to 3.30pm for usual collection, and between 3.30pm and 5pm if arranged in advance with CRS staff. If you need to adjust what you receive through the clinical resource services, please contact your cardiac care coordinator to discuss. The dieticians will organize the delivery of the feeding lines. They should be contacted to request any changes to those delivery items. Your child may also be linked into a hospital based paediatrician or other service consultants to monitor general health or specific conditions. If travelling from outside south east Queensland area, please contact the relevant outpatient clinics to request if appointments can be coordinated for the same day. However, this will only be possible if the corresponding consultants have outpatient clinics on the same day..

[Audio] On discharge from the hospital and depending on your child's age, it is recommended that you touch base with at least one of your community health supports. Child health clinics are a great resource for parents providing baby feeding and parent support programs, weighing facilities, Triple P groups and key age child health checks. If you don't know your local centre, you can search for the location on the child health website. If you feel your baby is feeding well, you may choose to get them weighed more informally at a local pharmacy that may have dedicated days with a child health nurse on site or provide access to scales as a weigh yourself option. Another great resource for parents is 13HEALTH – this is a confidential phone service that provides health-related advice and assessment of symptoms to Queenslanders 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. By assessing callers by phone, nurses estimate symptom urgency, rather than diagnose the cause of the symptoms, and will recommend an appropriate level and location of care Your local pharmacists are also excellent at providing information for possible drug interactions with popular over the counter remedies such as infacol or bongela, if your child is on any ongoing cardiac medication. Your family GP is a vital link in your child's health. They can assess the right pathway for any concerns, provide ongoing referrals, give repeat prescriptions for most tablet medications your child may be on and manage childhood illnesses and symptoms. If your child has had cardiac surgery during their hospital admission, it is always good to take your child to visit the GP soon after discharge so they can document a baseline assessment of your child, for comparison if they become unwell. Community paediatricians can provide support for your child's ongoing general paediatric health and neuro developmental assessments..

[Audio] There are few points to consider when attending the cardiac clinic here in Queensland Children's Hospital. Firstly, Medicare requests for us to provide bulk billing, all patients seen in outpatient clinics must have a valid doctors referral. GP referrals are valid for 12 months from the date they are used in clinic, so that is our preference for families to provide. You can also get a referral through your Paediatrician if your child has one, but this will only be valid for 3 months from the first date of use, which would mean that you would have to request this more frequently throughout the year. Your family will receive an appointment letter, if time allows for postage, or maybe be contacted by phone or SMS, if the appointment is short notice. You will also receive SMS messages prior to the day, requesting you confirm the appointment. It's very important that you confirm or let us know you will be unable to attend at the earliest opportunity, as we have high demand for our cardiac services. You can use the QCH website to find out information regarding coming for an appointment, travelling to hospital, accessing hospital services and facilities including a library of health resources and factsheets, and can take a virtual tour before arriving at the hospital. If you are travelling over fifty kilometres to attend a cardiology appointment here in Brisbane, you are entitled to receive state government reimbursement towards the costs of the travel through the patient travel subsidy scheme, known as PTSS. You should contact your local hospital patient travel department prior to the appointment to discuss options for your travel and they will provide you with the paperwork required to claim. Form C needs to be brought to the appointment for us to complete at the time..

[Audio] When you come to 3D, you will meet our receptionists who will confirm your contact and Medicare details. You should present any doctors referral you may have to them. Next, you and your child will be called into a clinic room by a cardiac nurse for height and weight, blood pressure and heart rate measurement and a ECG test of your child's heart rhythm. We may also ask questions about feeding, medication, general development and activity. Then you will move rooms to meet your child's cardiologist, who will examine your child and listen to their heart. If needed, the cardiologist will arrange for an echocardiogram by one of our cardiac scientists in our echo rooms. After the echo, the cardiologist will review the pictures and let you know what we need to watch and how any repaired areas are going. They will also tell you when you need to come back for a review appointment, if required. They will write this down and ask you to return this paper to the receptionists to either make the appointment then or note on our waitlist when your child is due back. It's important that you should ask for any renewal prescriptions of cardiac medicines your child is taking at the time of your clinic visit..

[Audio] If you have general non-clinical questions about attendance to clinic or appointment times etc, please contact our cardiac outpatients' reception staff through the hospital switchboard or on the contact details listed on your child's appointment letter. We ask that re-scheduling requests of your child's appointments be kept to a minimum as we may not be able to accommodate them within the clinical time period your cardiologist requested. If you have paperwork or forms that need to be completed by the cardiologist, please send them via email or fax to the cardiac reception staff to send through to your child's particular cardiologist..

[Audio] We hope you have found this quick presentation to be useful and answered some of your questions of how you and your child can be supported in their healthcare journey. Please ask for our contact card at your ward or 3D reception desk if needed. We look forward to working with you..