Procedural Sedation Services

Children are naturally active, so it’s often hard, if not impossible, for them to remain very still, especially for uncomfortable or long medical procedures. For this reason, the pediatric Critical Care team at Mary Bridge Children’s offers sedation for a variety of procedures that your child might find uncomfortable, long or scary.

Under sedation, which puts patients into a medically induced sleep, children are free of anxiety, pain and discomfort. Sedated children will not remember their procedure.

The most common procedures that utilize sedation include:

• Cancer treatment: Bone marrow aspiration, CT-guided tumor biopsy, lumbar puncture, radiation therapy
• Gastrointestinal procedures: Endoscopy, colonoscopy, flexible sigmoidoscopy

• Imaging services: MRI, CT, VCUG, bone scan, Meckel scan and other nuclear-medicine studies
• Pulmonary: Bronchoscopy
• Other procedures: Botox and phenol injections, EEGs and hearing tests, and so on, as recommended by your child’s doctor

Our expertise

Our sedation team consists of doctors, nurses, technologists and child life specialists. They will assess your child’s age, weight, developmental level and health history, and then — depending on the expected duration and discomfort of the procedure — will determine the most appropriate sedation medication and how best to manage your child’s sedation during their appointment. In most cases, we use anesthetics that are administered via an intravenous (IV) tube. Our certified pediatric critical care physician administers the anesthetic and remains onsite to monitor the sedated patient.

Pediatric sedation is provided in a dedicated room with full monitoring capabilities where parents can stay with their child as they go to sleep and be with them when they wake up.

What to expect at your child’s appointment

When your child requires a procedure that needs sedation, your child’s doctor will place the order for sedation.

Scheduling the procedure

For radiology procedures, schedule your child’s appointment by calling 253-792-6220, option three. The radiology scheduling office is open seven days a week, Monday to Friday from 7:30am to 8:30pm, and Saturday and Sunday from 8am to 5:30pm. Please note that these hours may differ from the hours available for appointments.

For all other procedures — such as endoscopies, colonoscopies, Botox injection, EEG and so on — the referring doctor’s office will schedule your child’s appointment. Please call your child’s doctor’s office for information regarding the procedure, including its scheduled date and time.

One of our sedation nurses will call you one to two days before your child’s appointment. You will be advised when and where to arrive, and the nurse will provide you with instructions regarding food and water intake prior to the procedure.

The day of the procedure

On the day of the appointment, please come to the indicated place. A sedation nurse will meet with you and your child and show you to our sedation induction area. Our sedation team — a nurse, doctor and child life specialist — will meet you there. The steps of the procedure will be explained to you and your child, if age appropriate. You will be asked to sign a consent form that will allow us to sedate your child.

An intravenous (IV) catheter will be placed and the sedation protocol will be explained to you. You may wait in the induction area while your child falls asleep. After your child is completely sedated, we will transport them to the appropriate area for their procedure.

At the end of the procedure, your child will be brought back to the induction area, where you may rejoin them. Your child will be attended to by the sedation nurse and monitored until they wake up.