Wendy Westbrook watches as Child Specialist Maggie Butler shows her son, Joel, 6, an iPad at the T.C. Thompson Children’s Hospital at Erlanger.March is Child Life Specialist Month. If you have no idea what that means, you’re not alone. But these behind-the-scenes experts play a vital role in happiness and well being of children in the hospital.
We try to make the impossible possible,” says Maggie Butler, explaining her job as child life specialist at Children’s Hospital. She’s baked cookies in patients’ rooms, set up lemonade stands at the nurse’s station, hosted ice cream socials on the hospital’s rooftop garden. She’s even played paintball.
“This little boy was so excited about a paintball gun someone had given him and was disappointed he couldn’t play with it because he was in the hospital,” she recalls. “I covered the back of his door with paper and let him shoot it. Physical therapy even used it later as an incentive to get him to sit up.”
She’s sitting in her office that’s packed to the brim with colorful blankets and toys. On the floor is her distraction bag, which includes an iPad, puzzles, games, bubbles, music and more. At first blush her job seems all fun and games. But Butler is quick to point out it is “play with a purpose.”
In that same magic bag is a doll she uses to explain medical procedures to little ones. The child can simulate on the doll whatever is about to happen to them, whether it’s an IV stick or a feeding tube. The process empowers the child, greatly reducing anxiety. Often a little patient will sit stoically through a procedure that would make an adult cringe.