LHSC program for teen patients earns praise, sparks interest at other hospitals

London Health Sciences Center (LHSC) is influencing health programming around the country, even if that programming is meant to distance patients from their care.

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The program, which started here in London, is what’s known as the Youth Connect, Relate and Engage (CoRE) program. It pairs teenage hospital patients with staff in a one-on-one setting, allowing them to hang out and take part in activities such as video games, board games, movies, and arts and crafts.

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Keanna Shrubsall has been a regular patient of the Victoria Hospital since she was six years old. One morning, she woke up with swollen and puffy eyes, which was initially chalked up to a potential allergic reaction but later diagnosed as focal segmental glomerulosclerosis.

According to the National Kidney Foundation in the US, the condition is caused by scarring in the kidney’s filtering system. Symptoms include swelling in the legs, ankles and eyes, weight gain from fluid buildup, high cholesterol, and too much protein in one’s urine and not enough in their blood.

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Shrubsall, now 17 and in Grade 12 at Sir Wilfrid Laurier secondary school, said the program fills an important gap in making younger patients feel more comfortable. While child specialists often work with younger children, adolescent patients didn’t have similar options until Youth CoRE.

“It’s just good to have someone to talk to about your experience,” she said.

Diana Kassem, a 20-year-old youth resource facilitator with the program, says the program started in 2019 and was born out of recommendations from the hospital’s child and youth advisory council, a body made up of former patients. They found that patients aged 12 to 18 were often very lonely, and the program was meant to give them more to do.

Kassem joined as a team member in May 2021, after she herself was a long-term patient at Victoria Hospital, having kidney cancer at an early age that required extensive treatments and an eventual transplant.

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“Understanding how it feels can help you really connect with patients better, and more easily because you know what they’re feeling and then you can know how to just chat with them,” she said.

The success of the program has led to national accreditation and recognition, becoming one among 15 “leading practices” LHSC has championed.

Tammy Quigley, the system innovation and business development executive at LHSC, describes the leading practice as an “innovative solution” to a problem that exists in Canadian health care, which can be shared with other hospitals.

“It’s an opportunity for us to say to the nation: ‘Hey, look what’s happening here in London, Ont., and in our children’s hospital, and in our adult hospitals,’” she said.

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Recognition from Accreditation Canada means representatives from other hospitals in Ontario and Canada as a whole may inquire about programming or even travel to London to learn how to replicate it.

Another example of a leading practice based out of LHSC is its virtual pediatric emergency department that it launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing “massive volumes” of patients to access care.

The program has been so successful in its goals achieving it has rubbed off on both Kassem and Shrubsall. Kassem is a third-year student at Western in health sciences, while Shrubsall hopes to study nursing at Fanshawe after high school.

“I feel like that has to relate to how (good) the hospital staff has been to me. I feel like they’ve played a major role in (me) wanting a career in the medical industry in the future,” Shrubsall said.

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