Seven month old Matilda was born with complex heart issues and weighing less than 3kg.
Her condition is called unbalanced atrioventricular septal defect with hypoplastic right ventricle, meaning the right side of her heart is 50% smaller than the left. Brave Matilda had her first operation at just two months old and spent her first 6 months at Alder Hey.
Matilda requires oxygen 24/7 but now thanks to a new remote monitoring solution developed by Alder Hey Children’s Innovation called ‘Little Hearts at Home’ (LHAH), Matilda is able to recover at home and grow and thrive before her next operation.
Community nurses visit the family in Kendal twice a week to record Matilda’s vital stats via the LHAH platform which are then remotely submitted to the cardiac team at Alder Hey. Parameters are set for each patient like Matilda, depending on their condition, and any alerts sent directly to the team so they can keep a close eye on them and give advice or intervention where needed.
It’s cut out the endless back-and-forth visits from Kendal to Liverpool. It feels like LHAH has given us our life back.”
Matlida’s mum, Beth
Cardiologist Dr Phuoc Duong who helped develop LHAH said “The platform is transformative in how we care for some of our most vulnerable children. We can send families home knowing they are safely looked after and it means we can be proactive rather than reactive. In Matilda’s case it facilitated a safe early discharge which meant she could make it home for Christmas. We hope to roll this out across different specialities in the future and keep more families together at home.
We’re used to life in the lakes and the hills going for dog walks. You can’t really do that in hospital. It was amazing to make it home for Christmas and spend time doing what we love.”
Matilda’s dad, Christian
The innovation hub at Alder Hey is designed to speed up the pace of development of standards in children’s healthcare. The LHAH at home is the first of its kind in the UK and is currently used by community nurses across 29 different regions including the North West, North Wales and Isle of Man. LHAH is a collaboration between AH Innovation Deptartment, Heart Centre & Objectivity.
We’ve recently announced our Innovation Strategy, ‘Today’s Child, Tomorrow’s Healthier Adult’, which aims to solve the healthcare problems faced by children and young people, advancing child healthcare within our region and beyond. We’re levelling the playing field in paediatric healthcare to enable a healthier future for all. Two overarching objectives shape our plan:
- Tackling Healthcare Inequalities- solutions that create pre-emotive interventions and provide individualised care
- Optimising Healthcare- solutions that optimise healthcare delivery, releasing more time for care