My Working Day: Brenda Harrington is a play volunteer with Children in Hospital Ireland. Key to her job is keeping children happy and free from fears and worries.
I work as a play volunteer for Play Well, the volunteer service of Children in Hospital Ireland (CHI). There are play volunteers in 18 hospitals around the country. I work in Temple Street hospital in the A&E department and in the outpatients department.
Each play area is set up with toys, books, board games, arts and crafts materials, puzzle and colouring sheets for all ages. We usually work in pairs and simply invite the children who are either in A&E or attending an outpatients' clinic to play.
In A&E, we usually don't have very long to play with the children and often it's the brothers and sisters of the child who is attending A&E who play with us. This gives the parents a chance to focus their attention on the sick child while the other children are kept occupied.
Even though parents are often under a lot of stress in the A&E department, they genuinely appreciate the service we offer.
We have red T-shirts on with the Play Well name and logo so that parents can see who we are. We're not there to talk to the parents and we don't know anything about the child's circumstances or illness, but we can sometimes help out with practical information about what's where in the hospital and the names of staff members.
Many children are very distressed when they come into the A&E department. They can be very clingy to parents but they will observe us playing with other children. When they see what good fun we're having, they can't help themselves but be attracted to the games we are playing.
From our point of view, we have to adapt games to accommodate children of all ages as we will never know the ages of children we will have at any given time.
In the outpatients clinic, we can get to know the children a little more as they are often attending a clinic over a period of time.
Our job here is to keep them happy and distract them from their fears and worries.
We have feedback from hospital staff who say that children are more relaxed and easier to treat after they have been playing with us.
As play volunteers, we have a volunteer services manager who liaises with the play therapist in each hospital. The play therapist will also have volunteers working in the hospital playroom.
All play volunteers are vetted by the gardaí and trained by CHI. You have to commit yourself for one year if you volunteer. Usually, you would offer to work one morning, afternoon or evening per week.
In my case, I first decided to train as a volunteer after my son was in hospital for a month just after he was born.
While in the hospital with him, I began to appreciate how valuable it was for families to have play volunteers. A while later, I saw a supplement in The Irish Times on volunteering and decided to contact Children in Hospital Ireland.
My husband and children are very supportive of what I do. There are many volunteers with CHI but we are always looking for new volunteers. Recently, a number of young single women and some men have become volunteers.
CHI also campaigns for better facilities for children in hospital. It has a written charter for children in hospital that it would like all hospitals to adopt and it has a panel of speakers who will visit groups to explain what we do.
Personally, I get a really great sense of satisfaction from this work and I feel having the opportunity to play gives children a better experience of hospital.
Children in Hospital Ireland can be contacted on tel: 01-8780448 or e-mail info@childreninhospital.ie