(WTRF) – Over the past few days 7News has introduced you to the WVU Medicine Children’s Transport Team. You know what they do and how much they need your support, but do you know why they go through all the training to provide this very specific level of care?
For many of them, it’s personal.
When the WVU Medicine Children’s Transport Team picks up a child, they’re getting more than just top-notch medical care.
One the medical care and then one your heart care. That heartfelt care is when you’re talking to them, trying to make them comfortable, giving them stuffed animals, just doing whatever you can to make that trip not hard for them.
Danielle Benson, Respiratory Clinical Specialist, WVU Medicine Children’s Transport Team
They’re a group of people who treat any child like their own.
When my first-born son was born he was transported by a critical care transport team. He’s a congenital heart baby and that need for specialty services kind of fuels my need to be a pediatric nurse.
Dawn Haught, RN, WVU Medicine Children’s Transport Team
WVU Medicine Children’s needs your help to give critical care when children need it most
They know what it’s like to travel in the ambulance as a child, maybe alone, probably scared and not feeling well.
I was kind of a sicker kid and I had to go to the hospital a lot and it meant a lot whenever I could go to a children’s hospital and get that specific quality care.
Brandy Blackwell, Respiratory Therapist, WVU Medicine Children’s Transport Team
The team said they work their hardest to make sure every child gets well, but also to make sure their parents are comfortable during the process.
Especially during this time whenever they have to be in patient or not be able to go with the patient whenever they’re transported and it gives them a little more comfort to knowing that somebody who sat in their shoes is taking their child to have better services.
Dawn Haught, RN, WVU Medicine Children’s Transport Team
Local businesses help with donations after canceled fundraisers for WVU Medicine Children’s
The transport team travels across West Virginia and surrounding areas, sometimes to places where this level of specialty care isn’t’ always available. However, they can’t help these children without the community’s support.
Being a sick kid and from a low income area where there wasn’t a lot of access to healthcare, it definitely does help to know what they’re going through, how scared they could be.
Brandy Blackwell, Respiratory Therapist, WVU Medicine Children’s Transport Team
The team wants children, parents, and those who support them to know, when the transport team picks you up they’re here for you.
It will be ok. We’ll make sure that it’s ok.
Brandy Blackwell, Respiratory Therapist, WVU Medicine Children’s Transport Team
The WVU Medicine Children’s Transport Team is trying to purchase some new equipment and continue training that’s critical to helping the sickest of kids right here in the Ohio Valley. They hope to raise the funds missing from canceled events the past two years.
If you’d like to donate, click here.
