Child Life Specialist

Child Life Specialist

The Child Life Specialist will support pediatric patients and families emotionally, socially, and developmentally. They will enhance care quality during illness or injury, including end of life and bereavement.

Essential Functions of the Role:

• Works to provide psychosocial care and advocate for pediatric patients. Ensures they receive medical care under optimal and positive circumstances.
• Provides therapeutic medical play and preparation sessions with patients and families. These sessions effectively build knowledge of medical procedures and coping strategies.
• Provides therapeutic opportunities for patients to express and understand feelings related to medical experiences, illness, or handicaps.
• Provides emotional support to families and patients through various interventions. Promotes acceptance of and coping with illness and medical encounters. Participates in planning safe, developmentally supportive environments for patients and families professionally.
• Provides age and developmentally appropriate activities that effectively promote the cognitive and emotional growth of patients.
• Functions as an effective member of multidisciplinary teams to improve the medical experience of patients and families. Communicates relevant patient observations to the health care team in written and verbal formats. Provides orientation and teaching of Child Life concepts to volunteers, medical, and nursing students as opportunities arise.
• Coordinates and plans special events for patients (i.e., birthday parties, celebrity visitors, etc.), as needed.

Key Success Factors:

• Possesses expansive knowledge of child development, child life theory and evidence-based practice, and childhood trauma and grief and therapeutic interventions.
• Demonstrates exceptional verbal and non-verbal communication skills. This includes appropriate language, facial expressions, listening, emotional regulation, empathy, social awareness, relationship management, self-awareness, affective matching, and presentation skills.
• Displays cultural expertise and respects patients, families, and medical staff with diverse spiritual, ethnic, language, educational, and socio-economic differences.
• Possesses effective time-management and prioritization skills for all child life tasks. Shows comfort and confidence working with minimal supervision.
• Proactively seeks out opportunities to give education to medical staff about child life services.
• Advocates for the psychosocial well-being of children. Manages the intense emotional stress when working with children and families facing serious illness, injury, end-of-life, death, and bereavement.
• Possesses excellent documentation skills with appropriate verbiage, punctuation, spelling, and professional tone.
• Cert Child Life Specialist (CCLS) OR obtain certification within 3 months of hire.

Qualifications:

• Education - Bachelor's
• Experience - Less than 1 Year of Experience

• Basic Life Support (BLS): BLS or BLS within 30 days of hire or transfer.
• Cert Child Life Specialist (CCLS): Cert Child Life Specialist (CCLS) OR obtain certification within 1 year of hire.