Help with therapy dog placement

Your pups safety is the top priority...

If you are uncomfortable with the assignment, gracefully decline for an opportunity you are BOTH comfortable with.

No shame in that... You have gone above and beyond already!

Blessing to you and Tully...

 

Caro, I would talk with the staff at the rehab facility and discuss your concerns for Tully with her hip issues and her need to only have very gentle handling and ask what patients she would have to interact with. Many mentally ill patients are gentle and would be good with Tully, but some are not.

Your most important issue is to keep Tully safe from injury and if you will need to expose her at this facility to patients who behavior is not predictable then, if Tully were mine, I would say "no go".

Trini

 

When I was deciding to put Emma into therapy work, it was stressed dog's safety. If I didn't feel safe, I was to leave. I would ask them to reassign you to a safer environment for your dog.

 

I think you should talk to the therapy centre and/or the rehab centre and ask about the client population you'll be visiting. Tell them about your concerns and they should be able to give you information that will help you make a decision. When I did my mental health rotation in nursing school, a lot of my patients were those suffering from severe depression and LOVED when the therapy dogs came to visit.

 

I could not say it better than Trini

(our beloved dogs, have only us to protect them)

 

Fully agree with both of these posts. Well almost all of them actually but Hanne and Trini pretty much nailed what I was going to say.

 

Woodbender summed it up...I totally agree.

 

This is going to be long and somewhat disjointed, but bear with me, please. While I agree you have to protect your little one, it's a mistake to make assumptions about the mentally ill. My eldest child was abused by his bio-dad before turning 3, and therefore spent a chunk of his childhood in a facility for abused/neglected children. He was there when my 2nd child was born.

One of the other children in the facility had had an extremely disturbed childhood up until that point. He had been found alone in an apartment -- his mother (and I use that word loosely) had left him alone while she went out "partying" at the age of 2 with no food and little water. It was estimated he had been there for 2 or 3 weeks, eating what little food he could find in the garbage and drinking from the toilet. There were no other relatives available, so he had been in the facility from the age of 2 until my son was there, when this other child was 9 or 10. Due to both the extreme neglect and probable abuse he had suffered, as well as some hereditary mental illness, he spent the vast majority of his time in the "quiet room" as he was deemed to be a danger both to himself and the other children.

When he was not in the quiet room, he and my son (who was 5 at the time) became friends. My son has always been charismatic and has the ability to calm people down, seeing the good in people that many others miss. When my second child was still an infant, we brought her to see her big brother. This other child asked if he could hold the baby. My son said it was okay, as long as this other child sat down and put a pillow on his lap. We, of course, were extraordinarily nervous as we knew this other child's history and current circumstances but decided to trust our son's instincts. My husband stood right beside this other child and gently lowered our infant daughter onto the pillow on his lap.

This other child, who was probably the most disturbed child I have ever met, held her as gently as anyone would hold a fragile piece of art and stared at her as if she were the Hope Diamond. In some small way, the fact that he was trusted and was treated as a normal little boy, if only for a few moments, had an impact on this little boy - who's future was one of institution after institution.

I guess the bottom line is that you cannot know how any one individual will behave, nor can you know the impact that seemingly small acts can have on people. I would encourage you to talk to the nurses/orderlies who have daily contact with the patients -- but do not hesitate to allow both yourself, Tully or them to have this special and potentially life-changing contact.

(for the record, my son has grown into a truly wonderful man with no long-lasting effects from his childhood traumas. The last I heard, the other child was sent to another institution, and unfortunately his future remained bleak)