Latinx Children and Surgery

Study Summary

Over 60 million persons in the United States (US) identify themselves as Latinx and 25.6% are children under the age of 16. Surgical disparities for adults and children have been identified as a major problem in the US and can be experienced at multiple points along a patient's health care trajectory. Data from the investigator's center indicates that a substantial portion of Latinx children who undergo surgery experience high anxiety and postoperative pain as well as postoperative impairments in psychological and physical functioning as compared to White non-Latin children who undergo surgery. Recent growth in use of mobile devices provides us an opportunity to create low-cost mobile health (mHealth) behavioral interventions to reduce this disparity in surgical outcomes. In a previous National Institutes of Health (NIH) award, the principal investigator (PI) developed and tested an evidence based mHealth tailored intervention (WebTIPS) that aims to prepare and be a companion of a child and their family during a surgical event. WebTIPS aims to enhance the recovery of the child in several ways such as reducing anxiety and pain and is based on information provision, modeling, and teaching of coping skills. WebTIPS, however, was developed and validated with a population of primarily White non-Latinx English-speaking children and their parents. Unfortunately, it is well established that mHealth interventions are significantly less effective when used with specific ethnic minorities unless they underwent a process of cultural adaptation. Over the past 4-years, the investigators have established multiple academic and community collaborations, conducted extensive participatory research with Latinx stakeholders and used the heuristic framework and a modified ecological validity model to culturally adapt WebTIPS. The culturally adapted intervention is called L-WebTIPS. The overall aim of this application is to reduce surgical disparities in a population of Latinx children

Primary Outcome

Child anxiety is assessed using the Modified Yale Preoperative Anxiety Scale (mYPAS) in four time points: the holding area, separation, entrance to the operating room, and the placement of the anesthesia mask. The mYPAS is an observational measure of preoperative anxiety in children consisting of 27 items in five domains of behavior indicating anxiety in young children (Activity, Emotional expressivity, State of arousal, Vocalization and Use of parents). For each category the child is scored fro

Conditions Studied

Interventions

• OTHER L-WebTIPS

Study Locations (1)