Dogs on Call program comforts patients, staff

Joanna Moreno

Contributing Writer

It is just another day at work for a greyhound named Koko, her tail wagging as she walks through the hospital, person after person stopping to pet her and say hello.

Denice Ekey, Koko’s owner and the program coordinator for the Dogs On Call program, said she sees such visits as a welcome distraction to people in the hospital.

At VCU Medical Center, therapy dogs regularly visit patients and staff. A program of the Center for Human-Animal Interaction in the Department of Psychiatry, the Dogs On Call program is devoted to helping people get through their day.

Dog teams, composed of the dog and its owner, visit most areas of the hospital except for surgery.

Alan and Vera Pollock, a husband and wife team who volunteer with their yellow Labrador retrievers Riga and Daisy, visit numerous places in the hospital about four times a month, including intensive care units and pediatrics.

Taking one dog at a time, they visit patients and try to strike up a conversation with them to get the patient’s mind off what is bothering them, staying with each patient for as long as 15 minutes and in the entire hospital for up to two and half hours at a time.

“It just brings a little normalcy into their environment,” Alan Pollock said.

The Pollocks have been volunteering since 2006, and Ekey said they have become very active members of the Dogs On Call program, participating in public relations events and educational activities.

Lea Peck and her dog Mollie, a 4-year-old golden retriever, are another dog team in the program. Peck, an occupational therapy student at VCU, is relatively new to the program. She and Mollie registered as a dog team in January 2009.

She said the Dogs On Call visits provide emotional support to both patients and staff.

“It just takes your mind off all the stress of your day,” Peck said.

Peck said she became interested in volunteering after attending a presentation given by Ekey for the occupational therapy department.

To become volunteers for the Dogs On Call program, both the person and dog must undergo training and pass the required tests, what Ekey refers to as the people end of the leash and the dog end of the leash.

The human volunteer must go to a volunteer orientation session, fill out all the paperwork to become a volunteer and familiarize themselves with the policies about visiting patients in the hospital.

The dogs must complete a therapy dog program. The Dogs On Call program is registered with the Delta Society, an organization that provides therapy dog training.

An evaluator from the Delta Society comes to the hospital to test both human and animals. Alan Pollock said the evaluator will role play activities that might occur at the hospital, such as arguing, or dropping noisy things or even have people crowd around the dog to test its reactions.

If the team passes, the dog and volunteer will receive a Delta Society ID and be able to visit anywhere in the hospital.

The Dogs On Call program helps dog teams become volunteers, Ekey said, and has them do two “shadowings.”

For the first shadowing, the volunteer visits once without their dog and follows another dog team during a hospital visit. The second shadowing involves bringing their dog and visiting people in the hospital with another more experienced volunteer supervising them.

Alan Pollock said there are two levels of dog visits, known as animal assisted activity and animal assisted therapy.

AAA consists of a more general meet-and-greet visit, where the dog will visit the patient and try to provide some emotional comfort. In AAT, the dog and handlers will work with the doctor to try to help the patient perform a particular activity.

According to Ekey, AAT is goal-oriented therapy, but she said she believes the two types can be very similar.

“It’s therapy any way you look at it, even if it’s just psychological,” Ekey said.

The CHAI has three components: education, research and clinical services. The Dogs On Call program is the most prominent portion of the center as one of its clinical services. The other clinical service is the pet loss support group.

Ekey frequently gives educational talks about therapy dogs and the human-animal bond, and also talks about research relating to the center. Research is conducted on the Center for Human-Animal Interaction’s programs, including how animal assisted therapy or activity might benefit a patient.

“What the research is now showing is that animals do way more than we ever thought as far as health and wellness,” Ekey said.

Ekey said research shows that animal visits help bring a person’s blood pressure down, and that it helps with pain management.

When a person is being visited by a therapy dog, Ekey said, they’re distracted and not thinking about their pain as much, so they will, in theory, use less pain medication.

Peck said the Dogs On Call visits have a positive influence on the staff, which in turn helps the patients.

“(Patients) get better patient care because the staff are less stressed,” Peck said.

Peck said the dogs can be used in terms of therapy, like testing motor control by having a patient brush a dog.

The Dogs On Call program consists of 35 to 40 dog teams, Ekey said. Many teams take time off for winter or take other breaks during the year from visiting, while other teams visit year-round.

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Sidebar:

(Information provided by Alan Pollock and Denise Ekey)

Dog teams must follow sanitation and confidentiality rules for each visit:

·      The dog must have had a bath within 24 hours of the visit.

·      The Dogs On Call volunteers must clean their hands before and after each visit.

·      If a patient wants a dog on the bed with them, the volunteer must place a towel between the dog and the bed.

·      The dog teams must follow a strict policy of confidentiality and cannot reveal the names of patients or anything personal the patient might tell them.

·      The teams are restricted from visiting patients with contact precautions.

Sidebar:

Therapy dogs versus service dogs:

Therapy dogs are different from service dogs. Therapy dogs may only visit certain places, like hospitals or nursing homes, and need permission to go anywhere else. They are trained to greet patients and staff and give emotional support.

Service dogs are dogs trained and given to a disabled patient, such as someone who is deaf or blind. They have a lot of legal standing and are allowed to go anywhere their owner goes, including restaurants and grocery stores.