IV Passport, and app developed with the help of parents, to help manage their children's intravenous catheter.

It is estimated that between 10,000 and 20,000 seriously ill children need an intravenous (IV) line or catheter each year, just in Australia.

This was the stacking reality of Gold Coast boy, Oliver Glover. He was born premature, with a bowel obstruction, which lead him to go into surgery right after his birth and lose most of his small bowel in this process. He spent the first eight months of his life in hospital, which meant that he needed to get a central venous catheter in his chest, which provided him with Total parenteral nutrition (TPN) for six nights a week.

The parents of little Oliver and the hospital he was staying on knew that IV lines were a challenging experience for many families who suddenly found themselves on a steep learning curve, which for them meant being not very literate about health care sometimes, to very quickly managing and being aware of the vitality of this device.

To help parents and carers to manage, experts at Griffith University and Children's Health Queensland worked with Oliver's parents, and many others, in order to develop what they said was a world-first app, called the IV Passport. The app contains the child's IV history, how and when to change dressings, medical appointment reminders, and advice about caring for the IV. This means that if things go wrong in the middle of the night, the parents have accurate and reliable resources that they can troubleshoot.

The information in this app is private but can be shared with hospitals, GPs or schools, if the patient wishes.

This story was adapted from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-01/brisbane-app-sick-children-manage...

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