Happy healthy bladder study

Purpose

Bladder problems among kids can vary from daytime or nighttime leakage of urine, urgency or rushing to the bathroom, and pain when peeing. Urotherapy is an approach to treat these patients that does not require surgery or medication. It is a 60-minute session that educates families on what a healthy bladder looks like and the behavioral and lifestyle changes necessary to maintain a healthy bladder. Topics such as water intake, frequent emptying of the bladder and poop habits are reviewed. Most patients (90%) will improve, though they have already experienced the decrease in quality of life, decrease in self-esteem and recurrent urinary tract infections that these bladder problems can cause. This has led us to investigate if urotherapy can be deployed as a preventative education initiative rather than just a treatment strategy.

With our research, we first aim to study the knowledge and attitudes of parents and pediatricians who care for these children via focus groups and one-on-one interviews in order to identify barriers to earlier bladder health education. Next, we aim to deploy local and statewide surveys to a larger group of these stakeholders in order to understand if there is a variation among different sub-groups. The results of this study will help inform future community-based interventions.