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Wednesday, 21 July 2010
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Day Case Patients on Sensory Voyage
Children coming into hospital for minor surgery often no longer need to be kept in overnight. Indeed many operations are managed through the hospital’s Day Case Unit where children arrive in the morning, have their surgery and can go home that night.
To support these children, the ARCHIE Foundation provides an admissions club where children and their families can come into the hospital in advance of their operation and see what’s going to happen – and where!
This is often great fun for the kids but can really help put parents/carers at ease too.
In addition to surgery, some of the children attending the Day Case unit are here for procedures which do not require a general anaesthetic. These tend to be carried out in our treatment room. During these procedures, the ARCHIE Foundation still has a role to play – and play is often the role we support!
In addition to supporting the Play Specialists working here with new toys and equipment, we installed a bubble tube within this room to help distract younger children. However, it quickly became clear that this was insufficient to calm anxious patients and had a reduced impact on older children.
The ARCHIE Foundation therefore provided Nintendo DS consoles for use by older children who could select from a number of games to play whilst the medical teams were carrying out their procedures.
These distractions proved effective but they still did little to support children who were particularly anxious about their treatment. After discussion between the children, families and staff we have therefore purchased a Sensory Voyager system – the second one of these within the Children’s Hospital.
The Sensory Voyager system allows us to turn any room into a child controlled sensory experience with light and touch to keep the child at ease and distracted. The fibre optic tubes and bubble tubes help calm children and they can create their own displays for use in the projector.
Early indications are that the equipment has been a huge success and both patients and staff report that it is making a huge difference to the experience of having these minor procedures carried out.
The Sensory Voyage was purchased at a cost of £3,500.00 from the ARCHIE Foundation’s general funds.
The ARCHIE Foundation is the official charity of The Royal Aberdeen Children’s Hospital and Community Based Child Health throughout Grampian and the Northern Isles.
