Meeting with the children before the event, we asked them how they'd feel if they were told they had to go to the hospital. We returned to the kindergartens after running the teddy-bear hospital. Only one in 20 children recalled being hospitalized before. You're not just observing, you're actively learning the best approach skills toward patients who are perhaps the most difficult to understand. We learned chiefly that it was much easier for them to show their problems on the teddy bear than to explain them on their own bodies.
Kids externalize their symptoms easier than the adults.
There is a Perah program in which medical students regularly go to elementary school classes to speak about oral hygiene, the dangers of smoking and preventive medicine in general. The children get a lot out of it, as do the students, whose tuition fees are reduced. They will certainly be impressed by the photos taken by BGU medical student and amateur photographer Ran Schweid, who volunteered his services. I could see that the children's fears and anxieties about contact with strangers and going to doctors had been reduced. Some kids have parents in the hospital.