f a c s
m a g a z i n e
|
f a l l
2 012
10
they’re more cooperative. Research is bearing this out.”
Being Wonderful
courses in health care-related issues and working in clinical venues. At GHSU, students complete more than a thousand hours of clinical work in a hospital setting. The program has a similarly demanding master’s level component that includes students taking coursework at UGA while spending one day each week at the Children’s Hospital of Atlanta. “The special needs of children and families are more at the forefront than ever before,” Wallinga says. “The longer we study, the more we realize that preparing children for medical procedures can make them less anxious. If a child has some intervention before a procedure,
The toolkit of a child life specialist is as varied as children themselves. Specialists must be precisely attuned to the developmental stages of the patients they’re assisting. They must be able to communicate effectively with kids, families, physicians and nurses. They have to be team players. They must be industrious—it can be difficult for young people to express themselves, and the specialist has to be able to work longer and harder to discover what they need. And, as Wallinga points out, they must be creative—what works for one child won’t necessarily work for another. They have to be adaptable and able to set priorities. In short, says Wallinga, “they just have to be wonderful.” For example, as part of “being wonderful” in one case, Wagner immersed herself in the world of Doc McStuffins, a Disney Channel show about a 6-year-old who heals her toys and dolls with help from her stuffedanimal pals, when she learned that a patient was a fan. Lauren Shinn, also a child life specialist at MD Anderson, is a strong proponent of play and often will demonstrate procedures using medical instruments on puppets. “We always say, ‘I’m here to play with you,’” notes Shinn, who earned her master’s
degree in 2010. “We want to open the door and be kind of a nonthreatening person, so that throughout their hospital journey, when they have those hard times, they have that established rapport so we can support them a little better.” Clearly, in order to build that rapport child life specialists necessarily must engage their patients more intimately than physicians and nurses do. And treating seriously ill children, Wallinga says, requires an additional unique ability: to be able to “self-care” in order to cope with the tragedy of very sick children. “Sometimes children die,” she says. “And you know that has to be tough.”
Connecting Creatively After cruising through the simulation, the 3½-year-old cancer patient whom Wagner assisted made it successfully through her treatment without sedation. “We added to her fairy flying costume for her treatment, including pink-tinted sunglasses—her flying glasses—so she could fly very straight and very still through the big proton machine,” Wagner reports. “She’s done a great job and asks her parents great questions that are helping her learn and understand more about why she is getting treatment, which is helping her understand more about why she must hold still.” The effort needed to get a preschooler to remain motionless