Special Feature - Starlight

Starlight: making space for health play

Starlight is a national charity that champions play in healthcare settings, working with health professionals, kids and families to provide toys, games and play experiences that reduce the fear and anxiety often associated with medical treatment. Laura Walsh, Starlight’s head of Play, tells Toy World about the charity’s vital work and how the Toy & Game industry can offer its support.

When we sit down for our interview, Laura has just returned from a stint at Glastonbury’s Kidzfield. A play professional in every sense, she likes to remind herself what it means to be a health play specialist by engaging in voluntary frontline work with kids several times a year.

“Starlight supports individual children engaged in healthcare, as well as around 1,000 healthcare settings across the UK, and we have over 100 incredible Health Play Champions out there in the community,” explains Laura. While healthcare professionals are there to help children, hospitals and other healthcare settings can cause anxiety, fear, pain and trauma. Play can help mitigate this, especially when the adults involved in the child’s healthcare, including the parents, are equipped with the knowledge and tools they need to create a calm and happy – perhaps even joyful – environment.

“We know that to make a long-lasting, systemic change, we need to focus on everything going on around the child at the centre of our mission,” Laura adds. “Anyone, be they a medical professional, community worker, clinician or health play practitioner, can apply on our website for resources to be sent out. There are also hubs on our website for families and professionals, packed with videos, downloadable guides and much more.”

“We provide training to help fill gaps in health play that we’ve identified - such as end-of-life care, communication methods and guided imagery strategies – audit play services and produce reports with recommendations, train healthcare professionals on how to identify and reduce fear and anxiety in their patients, whether that’s by actions as simple as hanging toys on their lanyard or asking about their pets, and try to identify and remove blocks within a healthcare setting that allow providers to expand their teams or bring in new bits of kit.”

Through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, Starlight has been able to paint a picture of the health play landscape in hospitals across the UK: whether there is a health play team in place, what a setting’s budget is like, and so on. Health play teams often receive absolutely no funding towards their work, while understanding and appreciation of the role of play within the healthcare system varies significantly from setting to setting and region to region.

Laura is keen to highlight that there are practitioners and care providers across the country doing incredible work in this space. Starlight co-chaired a task force with NHS England to identify and address the root causes of play inequality in the UK. Off the back of this, it has published the Play Well Toolkit, which contains guidelines for commissioning and designing health play services, recommended standards for health play services and a quality checklist for health play services.

“This is a huge success for Starlight, because we can standardise the support that should be out there,” explains Laura. “Now we’re trying to get our work on the agenda in parliament.”

Laura tells Toy World of two young patients Starlight has recently supported. The first, an 11-year-old autistic boy, was due to have major surgery on his hand and was understandably anxious about it. Starlight arranged for him to play Minecraft on a big screen while he was in hospital, which gave him a sense of control over his environment. When it was time to go into theatre and his anxiety spiked, a search-and-find Minecraft book and some tactile squishies provided the perfect distraction while his medical team prepared him for the anaesthetic.

The second, a 7-year-old girl, has spent nearly her whole life in a healthcare facility of some kind. Her condition is monitored through daily stool samples. Starlight’s health play team introduced the idea of making fake poo with Shredded Wheat to prank the nurses, with the “samples” gradually becoming more and more outlandish (we’re talking glitter and googly eyes). The nurses would play along, recoiling in mock horror when the lid of the sample pot was lifted, much to the patient’s absolute delight. “Sometimes, introducing a bit of silliness and nonsense to play is what really gets through to children,” says Laura.

Health play specialists take the time to find out from the child themselves what they love the most. Some children can’t wait to get hands-on with slime and compounds - making slime from scratch is even better. Play-Doh is a go-to compound brand, being at once comfortingly familiar and sensorially rewarding. Card games such as Uno and Dobble are easy and quick to play, so the doctors and nurses can enjoy a game or two with their patients, while squishies and fidget toys occupy nervous little hands. Lego and Duplo construction sets are always a hit, as is small world play: dolls, figures and play sets. The same evergreen themes appeal just as much to kids in hospitals as to kids at home, from dinosaurs and vehicles to animals and space, and the immersive nature of arts & crafts can help take the child’s mind off a scary situation. Oculus Rift VR headsets are also available for loan, in certain situations. These are remarkably effective at keeping children calm during unpleasant procedures such as lumbar punctures, which would ordinarily require a general anaesthetic.

Of course, providing resources and setting up play experiences requires funding. While Starlight is fortunate to have several corporate sponsors, it has limited funds with which to purchase products, and a huge number of requests coming in each year – far more than it can cater to. The readers of Toy World can make a big difference to Starlight’s work, by donating toys and games to the charity. There are details at the end of this piece for any suppliers keen to do so.

Retailers can get behind Starlight too, by stocking Starlight Dream Beams, from Happy Line Toys. Laura says: “If you’re familiar with the line, you’ll know that Dream Beams exist in a special online world as well as the physical one, where children can play games and solve puzzles with them. Kids derive enormous comfort from leaving one plush with their parent or caregiver and keeping another with them when they go off for their surgery or tests, so that they share a special connection. Imagine the positive impact we could have on children and families if we could land these by the tills in retailers right across the country.”

Laura concludes: “Structural inequalities in access to play can reduce a child’s ability to live their best possible life. Starlight can change this - play isn’t a ‘nice to have’. It’s the nuts and bolts of a happy childhood.”

To get in touch with the Starlight team regarding funding and donations, or ordering Starlight Dream Beams, contact Nicola Wilson, head of Corporate Partnerships - nicola.wilson@starlight.org.uk