Introducing Child Life Specialist (CLS)

Child Life Specialist (CLS) is a credential certified by the Association of Child Life Professionals (ACLP), U.S.A. CLS is specializing in providing psychological and social support to a child and his/her family in a medical setting. An eligible person for CLS must finish a special education course as well as a clinical training for proper professional experience and pass the test defined by the ACLP. There are 3 full-time Child Life Specialists working at the Shizuoka Cancer Center. They are providing broad-ranging supports to the child patients as well as those in the AYA generation and their families.

The job of CLS includes playing with a child patient, which is the focus of his/her life, and easing his/her anxiety through doing so. In addition, a CLS aims at supporting the child’s growth even in the hospital as if it was in the normal environment, and letting the child and his/family live their own lives whatever environmental changes they go through.

CLS keeps the following promises;

• I support each child patient to make his/her “hospital experience” less stressful or fearful.
• I support a child patient to let him/her be himself/herself to grow in the recuperation environment.
• I emphasize perspectives of a child and encourage him/her to exercise his/her own abilities and efforts.

What a CLS does at the hospital includes the following;

• Offering a play space in the hospital in accordance with the growth of a child.
• Trying to come up with an idea about making a child patient understand why and how he/she takes medical examinations and procedure or surgery, and letting him/her be prepared for them.
• Supporting a child patient in collaboration with the multidisciplinary staff to let him/her pursue the continuation of the social life including school or job during the cancer treatment.
• Supporting a child with the multidisciplinary team when his/her loved one (e.g., father or mother) has acquired a disease and cooperating with the sick in explaining about the disease.