Latin American Origin Children Undergoing Outpatient Surgery: An mHealth Intervention Study

NIH RePORTER · NIH · R33 · $2,708,494 · view on reporter.nih.gov ↗

Abstract

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 our center indicates that a substantial portion of Latin American origin 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 American origin children who undergo surgery. Since Over 60 million U.S. residents are of Latin American origin and 25.6% are children under the age of 16, this is a significant issue. Recent growth in use of mobile devices provides us an opportunity to create low- cost mHealth behavioral interventions to reduce this disparity in surgical outcomes. In a previous NIH award, the 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 English-speaking children and their parents and hence the need to revise the intervention so it could be directed at other populations. Over the past 4-years, we have established multiple academic and community collaborations, conducted extensive participatory research with Latin American origin 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 first phase of this application (R61) includes web programming of L-WebTIPS, conduct formative evaluation and conduct feasibly RCT to test this intervention. The second phase (R33) includes a multi-center RCT which aims to determine the effectiveness of L-WebTIPS compared to attention control intervention in decreasing postoperative pain, opioids consumption and lowering anxiety in Latin American origin children undergoing outpatient surgery. Secondary aims of the R33 include examining the impact of L-WebTIPS on home-based clinical recovery parameters such as pain, analgesic requirements, new onset behavioral changes and return to normal daily activity in Latin American origin children undergoing outpatient surgery. Finally we plan to determine if the use of L-WebTIPS reduces anxiety and enhance experience among the parents of Latin American origin children undergoing surgery. We submit that using a cultural adaption process for an existing validated intervention will accelerate the process of reducing surgical disparities and bringing an effective intervention to clinical settings and routine use

Key facts

NIH application ID
11110685
Project number
4R33MH132249-02
Recipient
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-IRVINE
Principal Investigator
Zeev Kain
Activity code
R33
Funding institute
NIH
Fiscal year
2024
Award amount
$2,708,494
Award type
4N
Project period
2022-09-01 → 2027-08-31