Roadmap for Clinicians
You don’t have to be a mental health professional to foster emotional health needs of your patients and families with chronic conditions. Patients and parents have emphasized the importance of their subspecialty clinical validating the stress of living with a chronic condition.
The Roadmap Project supports clinicians to build confidence and capability to address emotional health. Every visit, every time. Roadmap participants have helped us identify a series of steps that help your clinical team address emotional health:
Starting Discussions about Emotional Health:
The Normalize-Ask-Pause-Connect Technique
Roadmap has tools and resources to support you in addressing emotional health. Here is a process map that can help you identify your readiness. Clinical teams have valued a simple method that Pediatric Psychologist Erica Sood, PhD, teaches. Her Normalize-Ask-Pause-Connect Technique helps start discussions about emotional health with patients and families.
Helpful for: Clinicians, training program directors, and trainees
Addressing Emotional Health: A Self-Assessment
These questions will help you evaluate your understanding of emotional health and present example scenarios to help you put learning into practice while caring for patients with chronic conditions and their families. Once complete, compare your answers with the self-assessment key.
Helpful for: Clinicians, training program directors, and trainees
Maintenance of Certification (MOC) Part 2 Activity
The Self-Assessment MOC activity "Emotional Health and Resilience for Patients and Families with Chronic Pediatric Conditions," based on The Roadmap Project, confers 10 MOC Part 2 points and six CME credits when successfully completed.
Helpful for: Physicians
MOC Part 4 Activity
The MOC Part 4 Activity "A Roadmap for Supporting Emotional Health for Children with Chronic Conditions and their Families: A Quality Improvement Project Template (QIPT)," based on The Roadmap Project, provides 25 MOC Part 4 credits when successfully completed.
Helpful for: Physicians
Additional Resources
To complement the care that you are providing for your patients and families, the Courageous Parents Network offers resources shared by families and clinicians navigating the care of children with serious illnesses and a range of prognoses.
Links to resources for palliative care are also provided. Visit the link below and register as a provider or clinician to access the Clinician Portal.
For over 20 years, Project Sunshine volunteers have brought joy and play directly to pediatric patients through their network of more than 480 hospitals and medical facility partners across the country. Project Sunshine offers three programs:
Here to Play brings a group of local volunteers to facilities dressed in bright, yellow Project Sunshine t-shirts, and equipped with creative arts and crafts materials to the unit of your choice.
TelePlay is Project Sunshine's newest program and is a free, virtual play experience led by trained volunteers, using HIPAA-compliant technology and supports patients and their families both in and out of hospitals.
Kits for Play mobilizes volunteers to pack Activity Kits which are given to pediatric patients. Each kit includes developmentally specific activities, as well as a blank journal for creative expression. The materials spark joy and provide therapeutic value to the physical and emotional healing process.
Project Sunshine is a free resource to organizations and clinical teams. If you're interested in learning more, please visit the Project Sunshine website or email info@projectsunshine.org.