A Unique Collaboration: SBH and the NPC-QIC

What a special day! Today...February 1, the official "Go Red" Day when we are all wearing Red to honor those affected by Heart Disease and Congenital Heart Defects, Sisters by Heart thought it was particularly fitting to announce a very special joint project we've been working on with the National Pediatric Cardiology Quality Improvement Collaborative (NPC-QIC)!

Several months ago, Sisters by Heart began discussions with the NPC-QIC team about developing a video for HLHS parents, to be viewed prior to discharge from the Norwood, to set their expectations for the interstage period (between the Norwood and Glenn/Hemi) and give them reassurances that they were not alone during that terrifying time. Sisters by Heart took on the project with so much excitement, knowing that we'd have loved to have had something like that when we were discharged with our special babes!

We kept things under wraps, "secretly" doing our filming while on our annual retreat in September...

The NPC-QIC premiered the film at its Learning Session last weekend - and officially "went public" with it today, posting it to their page.

The hope is that this will be a useful tool for members of the Collaborative to use in their discharge planning, to better prepare parents for the interstage period. And, for families at hospitals not in the Collaborative (or in hospitals that are in the Collaborative but who aren't using the video in their discharge process), it will be available on the NPC-QIC's website.

Please go here to find out more about the Collaborative and how parents can become involved!

If you missed our blog post highlighting the Learning Session we attended last weekend, you can read it here.

We were so excited for the opportunity to collaborate in the creation and filming of this video and are proud to be able to finally show it to our families! Please share this and spread the word! Newly discharged families are not alone!