Off to the cuddly toy hospital

In the last few days, kindergarten children from all the Minihaus locations took their cuddly toys to St. Boniface’s in the centre of Munich, where medicine and pharmacology students had volunteered to set up the Teddy Bear Hospital. This project, run by doctors-in-training, aims to use play to help children lose their fear of going to the doctor.

A lot of effort goes into it; every child is ‘admitted’ with his or her cuddly toy, and then called in after a short waiting time. The little ones and their cuddly toys are accompanied through various stages, obviously starting with a discussion with a doctor to investigate what illness or injury the cuddly toy has, including diagnosis. They then go for further investigations such as X-rays or ultrasound, which are demonstrated to the children using lovingly hand-crafted equipment. Even ‘X-ray results’ are discussed with the children, and the students have the right picture ready for (almost) every cuddly toy.

Then it’s off for treatment; the teddy bear has his leg strapped up, the giraffe gets an injection, the penguin is vaccinated. There is even an ‘operating theatre’ where the children can carry out a small ‘operation’ on their cuddly toy, including oxygen. Obviously, this is all play and not for real, but the Minis were dressed up for it in real operating theatre scrubs!

Finally, the children were even able to look round an ambulance and have all the equipment on board explained, be told how a gurney functions - even the blue light and the siren were switched on! After the visit our Minis talked enthusiastically about how much better their cuddly toys were now, and all the things they had done during their Teddy Bear Hospital visit.

It’s a great project, which originated in Sweden. The teddy doctors are volunteer students from medical courses, and take complete care of the cuddly toy and the child during their stay. The volunteer project is organised by medical students of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and the Technical University, both in Munich.