A Patient's Guide for Pediatric Bowel Management

The first step in the process is to contact the Pediatric Bowel Management Program to schedule an appointment.

Once scheduled, a member of our staff will contact you to obtain information about your child to help us prepare for your first appointment. Please allow 15-25 minutes for this process. The information requested will include:

• Medical history
• Surgical history
• Radiology studies
• Any treatments or medications your child may be receiving

At the initial appointment, the bowel management team, including the physician and nursing staff, will meet with you and your child. You should bring any medical records and radiological studies (film or digital files on a CD or drive). Bringing these materials will help expedite the initial diagnosis and prevent any duplicate testing.

The bowel management team will review the information and discuss any relevant medical history or prior treatments.

We will explain the concept of bowel management and our treatment goals. We also will answer any questions you may have. It may be helpful to write down any questions you have ahead of time so that you can more easily recall them during the appointment.

At the conclusion of this initial visit, we will give you instructions for any additional testing and how to request records from other hospitals, if needed. In some cases, it may take several weeks for Cedars-Sinai to receive records and images from other institutions. It is important to note that we need the actual films or the digital images copied onto a CD/DVD so we can review them with our imaging specialists. Written reports of the studies from the institutions are not descriptive enough for a thorough evaluation.

Your first appointment will last about one hour.

After your initial appointment, a follow-up appointment will be scheduled to focus on formulating or adjusting your child's treatment plan. During this visit, we will discuss any records obtained from other hospitals as well as new study results.

Your child's individual therapy program may require daily abdominal X-ray studies, which are performed on an outpatient basis. These studies will help guide our treatment strategy by providing us with the necessary information to adjust the volumes and contents of daily enemas or medication doses to achieve bowel continence. We cannot optimize your child’s care and treatment without the information obtained through these studies.

We will aim to answer all of your questions and provide demonstrations for these therapeutic treatments. Our goal is to keep an open communication channel regarding your child's care and to serve as a resource to answer your questions as they arise.