Pitt Pediatrics congratulates Kelly Harris, MD, for her grant award from the National Palliative Care Research Center (NPCRC). 
The award was given for Harris’s project tilted “Investigating Clinician-Parent Communication at the Time of Prenatal Diagnoses of Complex Congenital Heart Disease” under the NPCRC’s Kornfeld Scholars Program. Harris’s project is 1 of only 9 being funded by the center in 2023.
Congenital heart disease (CHD) occurs in nearly one percent of infants, twenty-five percent of whom have complex CHD (cCHD), with life-threatening symptoms requiring invasive intervention. Prenatal diagnoses of cCHD elicit severe parental psychological distress and are associated with decreased physical and mental health for both parents and their children. Parents commonly cite uncertainties surrounding illness as a central source of their distress.
Harris’s project aims to investigate how to optimally communicate about uncertainties surrounding illness and respond to parental psychological distress during prenatal cCHD diagnosis. She will do so by evaluating what parents consider optimal communication and then discuss findings with clinicians via focus groups then develop and administer a survey to determine clinician experiences with, attitudes about, and training needs regarding communication during prenatal cCHD diagnosis.