Although this campaign has concluded, it's easy to give to Ohio University and support the Department of Social and Public Health.
The Department of Social and Public Health fund can be used to help us purchase training supplies for our child life specialist graduate program.
In addition to necessary medical and therapeutic intervention supplies we use in the classroom and simulation lab, we also purchase the necessary supplies for community outreach and partnerships where our child life graduate students, under the supervision of Janelle Mitchell, MS, CCLS, are working in clinical settings throughout the Athens community.
Most of the supplies we use repeatedly until they need to be replaced, while others are used once and must be discarded for infection control.
Photo from Janelle Mitchell's Medical and Therapeutic Play course for graduate students. The class takes place in the dedicated child life teaching space in Grover W313 (while the clinical simulation lab is on Grover's 2nd floor.)
Associate Professor and Coordinator of OHIO's Child & Family Studies/Child Life program Dr. Jenny Chabot, CCLS shared, "The supplies we would purchase from alumni donations will help us to keep the necessary teaching supplies. It also allows us to increase our presence in the community, helping with inoculation clinics, providing support for vision and hearing tests for children, providing Medical Teddy Bear Clinics in more settings each year than just the handful we currently do, and allows us to staff and provide necessary support to new opportunities that are open to us. Our closest children's hospital where students can fulfill the required child life volunteer hours necessary to be competitive in the child life practicum and internship application process, is 75 miles away, so we are geographically disadvantaged regarding access to pediatric healthcare volunteer opportunities. So, our ability to create partnerships in our community is essential.
Chabot continued, "Alumni have been the heart of our child life specialist academic program and we are so proud to have such incredible ambassadors to the profession and to our program. They have been very supportive of our efforts to make our program even stronger, especially in our clinical training on the graduate student level. With the building of the college's Interdisciplinary Simulation Lab, we now could take our clinical training to the next level, and to do that, we need funding to keep our supplies replenished and updated. Additionally, we have added new community outreach efforts by placing our graduate students in settings where their skills and expertise help assist medical staff, children, and their families, under the supervision of our Assistant Clinical Professor of Child Life, Janelle Mitchell, MS, CCLS."
"Our alumni understand the need for access to supplies needed to continue and build on our clinical training as we prepare future child life specialists."
Could pay for items for children’s clinics, such as board games, seek & find books, bubbles, and cleaning supplies
Could pay for medical supplies for clinical training, such as IV start prep kits, anesthesia masks, and bereavement supplies
Could pay for 8 Shadow Buddies or 6 Teddy Bears for Medical Teddy Bear Clinics, or Materials for 40 Cloth Dolls