Starlight Sites^TM: Havens for Hospitalized Children

Starlight Site^TMplayrooms, teen lounges, waiting rooms and playgrounds are beautifully designed, inviting hospital environments created to provide pediatric patients and their siblings with a place to relax and play during their hospital stay. Starlight Site care rooms provide a warm environment in which young patients can receive treatments.

A distinctive part of our service to children, Starlight has a long history of transforming designated areas of sterile hospital environments into colorful, inviting oases that can be enjoyed by young patients and their families. More than 100 hospitals throughout the United States have Starlight Site playrooms, teen lounges, playgrounds and waiting rooms that reflect Starlight’s creative touch. Offering a variety of entertainment and play activities, these rooms include such diversions as video games, computers, toys, crafts, and best of all, the company of other children.

Starlight Sites help ease young patients’ stress by stimulating the senses, providing an antidote to loneliness and an escape from the isolation of a hospital room. Off limits to medical procedures, doctors must check their white coats at the door. While each is unique, every Starlight Site offers respite from the tedious routine most pediatric patients face.

Whether viewing their favorite sci-fi thriller on the big screen, playing a challenging video game, or expressing creativity through artwork, the effects on young patients are remarkable. For children confined to a hospital, the opportunity to have fun in a well-equipped, inviting atmosphere assists in the healing process.

As a new addition to our Starlight Site program, Starlight has recently begun rennovating hospital treatment rooms. An increasing number of very seriously ill children undergo procedures in hospital treatment rooms and then return home immediately or shortly thereafter. Though it is in these rooms where some of the child’s most difficult and painful experiences occur – such as spinal taps, biopsies and other invasive examinations and procedures – the rooms themselves are often dreary and intimidating because they are overlooked when patient rooms and other areas of the hospital are renovated to be more child-friendly.

Medical staff, parents and the children themselves asked Starlight to improve these environments to help calm worries, reduce fears, provide a distraction from pain. Making the rooms warmer and more comforting will help make the child’s experience less frightening and at the same time increase his or her cooperation during the treatment process.

Currently, you can find Starlight Sites in the following MidAtlantic hospitals:

• Johns Hopkins Children's Center - Baltimore, MD 
• Children's Hospital of Philadelphia - Philadelphia, PA 
• Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh - Pittsburgh, PA 
• Children's National Medical Center - Washington, DC 
• Georgetown University Hospital - Washington, DC
• HSC Health Care System - Washington, DC 
• St. Christopher's Hospital for Children - Philadelphia, PA 
• University of Maryland Hospital - Baltimore, MD 
  

If you would like to learn more about the Starlight Sites program, or how you can bring a Starlight Site to a hospital in your community, please contact us, at rebecca@starlight-midatlantic.org.