Comfort positions are recognized by child life professionals as an effective, low cost, and quick intervention for reducing stress during medical interventions for children and teens (Stephen, 1999). Despite research demonstrating these benefits, comfort positions can be misunderstood and underutilized by the medical community. Attendees will gain insight into how to implement comfort positioning into various medical settings.

Children impacted by death will likely experience intense grief and mourning. Child life specialists are able to assist children, families, and the community throughout the bereavement process. A review of death disclosure strategies, and tools to extend child life services in bereavement support in the pediatric hospital, adult hospital, and the school setting.

Stir your imagination and be inspired. Come listen and learn during these three, 30-minute presentations.

The amount of limited English proficient (LEP) patients and families present in hospitals continues to grow. In this presentation, attendees will learn about the role and characteristics of a medical interpreter and how to enhance meaningful interactions with LEP children and caregivers.

DOMAIN: Intervention; 1.5 PDU's - Engaging in difficult conversations is not solely about having the “right” words; it’s about how compassion, perspective, and words work together to create meaningful conversations.

This presentation discusses strategies for supporting families that utilize competing coping efforts in response to stressors. Whether attempting to cope with new diagnoses or end-of-life, stress is a shared experience. With limited space and time to process at an individual level, patients and families may respond with clashing coping behaviors. This session explores the specialist’s role in supporting multiple coping strategies, and provides an effective tool for navigating these experiences.

This presentation will examine a multidisciplinary approach to caring for families being discharged from hospital post stillbirth, miscarriage, infant or child death, apprehension by child protective services, or adoption. Pediatric child life specialist and social worker have developed a new concept in how to collaboratively care for and support these families. This idea and its inception will be explored while also touching on what to be mindful of while working with this patient population.

​Child life specialists may be challenged in planning therapeutic interventions to adequately meet the developmental needs of adolescent patients. Adolescent patient’s have a need for social comparison information and identity formation. This workshop will provide practical ideas for incorporating bibliotherapy and narrative medicine into practice to bridge this gap.

​This presentation will outline research conducted from analyzing 3.8 million online interactions about illness from pediatric patients. SUGGESTED DOMAIN: Intervention

Not so far in the future, in lieu of popping a pill, clinicians might prescribe a virtual beach vacation to ease aches and pains. Cardiologists might offer scenic tours of Icelandic fjords to lower blood pressure, instead of doubling up on drugs. Hospitals might immerse children in fantastical play lands while they receive chemotherapy or undergo frightening medical tests. It’s all starting to happen now because of virtual reality (VR). For decades, scientists in elite universities have been quietly discovering the surprising health benefits of VR for ailments ranging from burn injuries, to stroke, to acute stress. Over 3000 studies reveal that VR has an uncanny ability to block pain, calm nerves and boost mental health without drugs and their unwanted side effects. But the technology has been too expensive, unreliable and unwieldy for the research to translate beyond the pages of academic journals and doctoral dissertations… until now. Explosive advances in delivering low-cost, portable and high-quality VR to the masses has spawned a field called Medical VR. In this lecture, Dr. Spiegel will describe frontline stories of using VR in over 3000 patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and will review his lab’s latest clinical research, including a recent randomized controlled trial testing VR in the hospital setting. The lecture will also review their new research using VR for blood pressure management, opioid reduction, and pediatrics at Cedars-Sinai. Two lucky registrants of this webinar will win free conference registrations to the 2019 Conference on Virtual Medicine. To learn more about this conference, please visit https://www.virtualmedicine.health/