Nurse realizes dream of sleep clinic for children

Any parent knows it can be difficult to get a child to get to sleep soundly but what if something in a child’s sleep pattern can be a sign of a much bigger problem?

The Pediatric Sleep Institute in the Pediatric Medical Pavilion in Plano has been addressing sleep and neurological disorders since February in their state-of-the-art facility designed especially for children down to the smallest detail.

The Pediatric Sleep Institute was the vision of owner and marketing director, Lori Sands, RN, BSN.

The facility is set up with five different rooms, each with their own theme, decorated and furnished with a mother’s touch to make the young patients feel more at home than they might in an adult lab. Patients include children of any age n even high school and college students who are still under their parents’ insurance.

Each room has been furnished with custom-made furniture with rounded corners and beds with padded headboards for children with conditions that can cause them to seize or bang their heads during sleep. Beds are extra-long twin sized for the big ones and portable cribs with Plexiglas sides are available for the extra-small ones. There are also televisions in every “bedroom” for kids to watch cartoons or their favorite DVD.

For further comfort, Sands commissioned light panels for the fluorescent lighting above each bed. When the light is turned on, children can see out the “window” into a simulated starry night sky.

Accommodations have also been made for parents including a pull-out sofa in the rooms and a common lounge area complete with refrigerator, snacks, coffee and a computer.

“I went to the Vanderbilt sleep clinic [in Nashville, Tenn.]; I talked to specialists about what they would need. I wanted this to be the ‘Ritz Carlton’ of sleep clinics,” Sands said.

The rooms are equipped with high-tech monitoring equipment and cameras which deliver a live feed to five separate computers that allow technicians to keep an eye on patients while they sleep.

The institute’s medical director, Dr. Hillary Baldwin, is a pediatrician and board certified pediatric sleep specialist. She reads the sleep studies with a goal to relay results to patients’ primary doctor within 48 hours.

Sands, a Plano native and mother of two, began her career in the marketing and communications field and later made the change to nursing. Her new passion stemmed from her experiences with the nurses who cared for her when health issues led her receipt of a pacemaker.

“When I had a good nurse, I had a good day; when I had a bad nurse, I had a bad day,” she said. “It just changed my life and my focus.”

Sands served Frisco Independent School District as a school nurse but wanted to see the results of care that students received long after her job was done. When her husband, Clint Sands, was diagnosed with sleep apnea, his experience with sleep study facilities revealed to the couple the need for a center designed especially for the needs of children.

Sands’ husband agreed to take care of the business side of things while she set up the layout of the facility.

“This was sort of my dream n I worked with my kids’ pencils to figure the layout,” she said.

According to Sands, before the Plano location opened, the only pediatric sleep evaluation facility available in the region was Children’s Hospital of Dallas, where long waiting lists keep patients from the testing they need.

After only three months in operation, the sleep institute now boasts enough technicians to maintain a rare one-to-one ratio of technicians to patients when needed.

As more area pediatricians and family physicians catch wind of the Pediatric Sleep Institute, the word is spreading about neurological and sleep disorders that can occur in children.

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