Teddy Bear Hospital – Slovenia (SloMSIC)

Name of the activity: Teddy Bear Hospital

Country/NMO: Slovenia (SloMSIC)

Program: Children Health & Rights

Contact information: [email protected]

Type of the activity: Campaign

General description:

Our main goal is organizing workshops for children aged 3-7, helping them lose fear towards doctors and hospital environment using simple role-play where a child brings his ill toy to interact with a teddy doctor – student. In addition, we teach the children about the anatomy and physiology of the body and offer healthy living advice throughout the play. Using adjusted approaches, our plan is to continue working with the special needs children and their educators, to relieve stress caused by visiting a doctor.

Focus area:

Children & healthy habits (physical activity, healthy eating, hygiene, etc)

Problem statement:

We want to teach and show children to learn from experience while being within their safe, known environment, instead of letting them believe the hospital/doctor/diet related stereotypes seen in the cartoons or movies, healthcare related phrases they may hear from their parents (all common for our environment) and the ones, presented by the fear of the unknown itself.

Target groups and beneficiaries:

Our target group are children, aged 3-7 years. The benefits aim towards children to reduce the fear of doctor/hospital related topics and medical students, who gain experiences working with pediatric population. Indirectly it also positively affects the doctors and future doctors, who will be treating these children in the future.

Objectives and indicators of success:

In 2018:
• in the activity engage 50 new students,
• carry out 26 workshops/ year, each of them including on average 60 children. Have 3 workshops with special needs children.
In October 2018:
• organize the event about Leukemia in children, lectured by professional lecturers – a questionnaire at the end of the event.
The above will be followed collecting data and possible improvement suggestions from the people taking part in project related activity. The data will be compared with the data from 2017.

Methodology:

Web based promotion (social media, mail) to attract student volunteers to participate in the activities, workshops, regular meetings for discussing possible project improvements, gathering and analysing feedback from the workshops (number of participants, activity duration, outcome).

Plans for evaluation:

Evaluation will be done by collecting data for monitoring the actively participating students (number of participants, activity duration) and their feedback about the workshops and project presentation. At the end of the presentation with professional lecturer(s), the questionnaire will test some of the newly acquired skills about the friendly approach to the children. The data will be compared to the ones, collected in 2017.