DUBLIN, Ga. — For kids who have doctor and hospital anxiety, going for check-ups, or surgery can be really scary. According to Yale-New Haven Hospital, doctor anxiety peaks for children between six months and four years old.
That's where Fairview Park Hospital's committee steps in.
This group has been working on ways to reduce hospital anxiety for kids over the past year. They've done that with families like the Carters in mind. Blake and Jaimie Carter just had their first baby at Fairview Park Hospital two months ago.
"This is our miracle baby!" Jaime Carter said.
She said he's a miracle in every single way. She had multiple complications in her pregnancy and said her baby, Wyatt Carter, was born several weeks early and needed surgery in his first month.
Soon after giving birth, the parents found themselves back at Fairview Park Hospital, because their baby couldn't keep food down.
"It was quite terrifying for a mother," Jaime Carter said. "I was horrified, but they were so nice, they were able to talk to us about what's gonna happen."
Carter credited Dr. Andrew Bozeman, one of the hospital's pediatric surgeons and who was the one who performed the surgery on her son, and his staff for an "amazing" job caring for her and her son.
She said they checked on them and their "miracle" often to make sure everything was all good.
"You have to strike the right chord with relatability and make sure that you're relating not only to the child, as, let's make sure that you can relate to the parents as well," Bozeman said.
She said her son was a miracle in another way too, as he was the hospital's first patient to receive the treatment surfactant to help keep food down. Between that, and the surgery, baby Wyatt Carter started keeping food down again, and is growing faster than his parents can keep up with.
Dr. Bozeman knows that parents can come in with a lot of anxiety too, so he said extra communication from medical staff can help put parents more at ease before their child begins to heal like Wyatt Carter did.
"I'm a father of three, and so I think that comes into play," Bozeman said. "(I think) what would you want for your own kid? I wanna know that the best people are taking care of my kids and that they can converse with me and they talk, and they have empathy, and that we share that bond, that you're taking care of my most prized possession. That's what we're trying to do here at Fairview."
He works alongside a team that includes same-day surgery manager Halee Childers, who also manages the post-anesthesia care unit.
She said they're going to add cartoon ceiling tiles soon, and they just got little tyke cars for parents to wheel their kids around in, iPads for kids waiting on surgery, and mini-surgery caps with cartoons for kids to pick out and wear during their hospital visit. A local church donated the surgical caps and kids can take them home after their hospital visit.
"This way, they're gonna feel like they're part of the team," Childers said. "'Oh hey, I don't need to be scared of him because I can't see his hair, because he can't see mine either.'"
She said parents should remember that anxiety can come from a fear of the unknown. Childers also recommends parents talk to their kids after appointments, to find out what scared them, so parents can talk them through the next time.
She said lying to kids can only add to their anxiety, so treat them like adults in that sense.
"A lot of times with kids, they just wanna know what's going on. And sometimes we just have to make sure we're explaining it in a way that they can relate," Childers said. "...We don't try to downplay anything that they're gonna have, cause they are scared, and it's important that we really address those concerns headstrong," she said.