At University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children Hospital, families play an important role in a child’s recovery. Rainbow’s continuing commitment to family-centered care means that staff members offer families the support and education they need in order to understand their child’s condition, treatment plan, and potential responses to medication. Rainbow’s staff also helps families maintain as normal a daily routine as possible while their child is hospitalized.
Among Rainbow’s features:
- Patient rooms that are spacious enough for parents to stay overnight. Each room has a small refrigerator, bathroom, sleep sofa, television, VCR, and hookups for computer games.
- The oncology unit has a special air-handling system to minimize infection.
- Child life specialists offer therapeutic, educational, and recreational interventions for families to help children through procedures.
- Rainbow’s own closed circuit television station provides unique and interesting art and music therapy activities, in addition to purchased programming on pertinent topics.
- Rainbow’s Family Resource Center offers recreational and lay-medical reading materials. Patients can also access STARBRIGHT World, a private computer network that helps children interact with other hospitalized children throughout the country.
- Teachers from Cleveland’s public schools help Rainbow patients keep up with their classes, in spite of their hospital stay.
In addition, the ambulatory oncology unit enables patients to receive prolonged chemotherapy infusions, blood transfusions, and extensive evaluation without admission to Rainbow. All patients receive outpatient care in the pediatric area of the Ireland Cancer Center, located on the sixth floor of the Bolwell Health Center at University Hospitals.