PSYC 450 Week 5 Site Visit Journal 2 Example

Site Visit Journal 2: A Tuesday in the Hematology-Oncology Playroom and What Normal Play Means for a Child on a Long Hospital Stay

Setting and Hours

My second set of observation hours, five on two weekday afternoons, brought my total to ten. I spent them in the playroom of a pediatric hematology-oncology unit, again shadowing a certified child life specialist, whom I will call Ms. Renee. A sign on the playroom door lists three rules: no medical procedures, no talk about tests or numbers and everyone cleans up together. Nurses who need a child must ask Ms. Renee, and the child walks out to them. The room has a craft table, a Lego table, a shelf of board games and a television that is almost never on.

One Afternoon With Marcus

A ten-year-old I will call Marcus was in his third week of chemotherapy for leukemia. The nurses told Ms. Renee he had refused to leave his bed for four days. When she visited his room, he kept his face turned toward the wall. She did not ask him to come to the playroom. Instead she said she had a problem: the little kids kept wrecking the Lego table, and she needed someone who knew what he was doing to be in charge of it that afternoon.

Marcus said nothing, but forty minutes later he arrived in a wheelchair, pushing his IV pole. Ms. Renee handed him a box of mixed pieces and introduced him to a five-year-old who wanted to build a fire truck. Within half an hour Marcus was sorting pieces by color, showing the younger boy how to lock wheels onto an axle and arguing cheerfully about whether fire trucks need ladders. He stayed for two hours. When a nurse came to the door for his vital signs, he told her he was busy and would be out in five minutes, which she accepted with a smile.

Connections to Course Material

Rollins et al. (2018) describe normalization as helping children keep ordinary childhood experiences during illness, and they note that school-age children in particular need opportunities for competence and contact with peers. Marcus had lost both. The role Ms. Renee offered him restored a sense of mastery, a chance to be good at something, and it shifted him from patient to helper. The playroom's rules protected that shift by keeping medical demands outside its door. The Child Life Council (2011) places play and the support of normal development at the center of the profession's work, and the playroom is where that commitment becomes a physical space.

Koukourikos et al. (2015), reviewing research on play during hospitalization, concluded that play is an essential part of children's development and a natural form of communication, and that in the hospital it reduces the intensity of negative feelings and contributes to physical and emotional well-being and recovery. They also emphasized that its benefits depend on professionals with training, patience and the willingness to use it, which matched what I saw. Ms. Renee's offer looked casual, but it reflected a careful reading of what Marcus needed.

I also noticed how Ms. Renee managed children of different ages in one room. She seated the teenagers at the far table with board games and music on headphones, close enough to join in but not expected to. A fourteen-year-old girl who had been reading alone eventually wandered over to judge the fire truck, which Ms. Renee later told me was the first time she had spoken to another patient all week.

Reflection

I had expected the oncology unit to feel sad, and some moments did. What I did not expect was laughter. I want to understand how specialists like Ms. Renee keep this balance, and for my final journal I hope to observe how the team supports a family facing more serious news.

References

Child Life Council. (2011). The official documents of the Child Life Council.

Koukourikos, K., Tzeha, L., Pantelidou, P., & Tsaloglidou, A. (2015). The importance of play during hospitalization of children. Materia Socio-Medica, 27(6), 438-441. https://doi.org/10.5455/msm.2015.27.438-441

Rollins, J. H., Bolig, R., & Mahan, C. C. (Eds.). (2018). Meeting children's psychosocial needs across the health-care continuum (2nd ed.). PRO-ED.