Packard Paws Pioneers Echo and Donatella Retire After Years of Service

After years of supporting sufferers and households, Echo and Donatella, two founding members of the Packard Paws Facility Canine Program at Stanford Medication Kids’s Well being, are retiring.

Collectively, the canines have accomplished greater than 4,000 affected person periods and helped lay the muse for a program that features eight facility canines and continues to develop. Their retirement marks an essential milestone for Packard Paws, and their legacy will proceed by the subsequent technology of facility canines following of their paw prints.

A shared imaginative and prescient

Packard Paws started with a shared imaginative and prescient in 2017, when youngster life specialist Molly Marchand and doctor assistant Alyssa Giacalone independently started exploring how specifically educated canines might encourage sufferers to beat challenges and stressors throughout their pediatric care.

Giacalone’s perception within the therapeutic energy of the human-animal bond started whereas she cared for Honey, her grandmother’s cocker spaniel–dachshund combine, throughout her grandmother’s hospice care. She noticed how Honey introduced consolation and happiness to her grandmother whereas encouraging different residents to go away their rooms and join with each other.

“I shortly turned fascinated by the way in which an animal might break by limitations and convey connection, consolation, and pleasure in a well being care setting,” Giacalone mentioned.

The expertise confirmed her the profound impression that animals can have on folks’s well-being, social connections, and engagement.

Giacalone carried that have together with her when she joined Stanford Medication Kids’s Well being in 2015 as a doctor assistant in Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgical procedure. There, she met Sandy Sentivany-Collins, who had beforehand labored together with her canine Carly on the Lucile Packard Kids’s Hospital Stanford ache administration staff. The introduction impressed Giacalone to pursue a brand new undertaking alongside her scientific tasks.

As Sentivany-Collins shared her information and expertise—from handler tasks to navigating the hospital with a canine—Giacalone started to see how a facility canine program might be built-in into care at Packard Kids’s. She researched breeders specializing in canines educated for service work, which led her to Echo. Once they first met, Echo instantly ran to Giacalone and climbed into her lap.

Whereas Giacalone was exploring ways in which canines might help sufferers, Marchand was working towards the same objective. About six months after becoming a member of Stanford Medication Kids’s Well being as a baby life specialist, Marchand approached the kid life director with a proposal for a program that will mix her love of animals together with her dedication to supporting youngsters.

Marchand studied packages at different youngsters’s hospitals and started imagining what one might seem like at Packard Kids’s.

“As soon as I realized that different youngsters’s hospitals had facility canine packages, I knew this was one thing I needed to start out right here at Packard,” Marchand mentioned.

Across the identical time, she encountered Giacalone coaching Echo within the hospital’s perioperative space. Their concepts converged at simply the suitable second. Collectively, Marchand and Giacalone designed the Packard Paws program, working with the suitable departments and stakeholders to ascertain insurance policies and finest practices.

Echo underwent in depth coaching round IV poles, wheelchairs, and different medical tools. He additionally turned acquainted with hospital sounds, equivalent to emergency alarms, so he might stay calm and targeted in a posh pediatric care setting.

After a couple of 12 months of coaching, Echo turned Packard Paws’ first facility canine in January 2018. Across the identical time, Marchand utilized for a facility canine by Canine Companions for Independence, a nonprofit group that gives educated facility canines freed from cost. She was matched with Donatella, generally known as Donnie, who started working at Packard Kids’s in Could 2018. Donnie is educated in over 40 instructions designed to encourage and encourage sufferers.

Supporting sufferers by difficult moments

Packard Paws was created to assist normalize the hospital and clinic environments, encourage sufferers to satisfy well being care objectives, and scale back stress and anxiousness throughout hospital admissions, procedures and clinic visits. By means of a structured animal-assisted strategy, facility canines can help ache administration and emotional well-being, and assist pediatric sufferers have interaction extra totally of their care. Working alongside educated hospital worker handlers, facility canines present goal-directed therapeutic interventions tailor-made to every affected person’s wants throughout outpatient surgical procedure, intensive and acute care, ache administration, trauma, neurology, and consuming dysfunction packages. The groups additionally present significant help to employees members throughout high-stress and traumatic scientific conditions.

Echo’s calming presence has made an enduring impression on sufferers and households over time at Packard Kids’s.

Elena, whose youngster Joseph shaped a particular reference to Echo whereas receiving care at Packard Kids’s, shared how the ability canine supported him throughout a troublesome time:

“Echo supplied Joseph with consolation when anxiousness felt overwhelming and unhappiness took over. He helped Joseph course of his feelings throughout moments when phrases weren’t sufficient. Echo made walks across the hospital ground one thing Joseph truly appeared ahead to—encouraging him to rise up, hold shifting, and discover motivation even on days when he felt exhausted and discouraged.

“There have been moments when Joseph simply wanted to be held, to cuddle and to really feel heat and unconditional love. Echo was there for him in these moments, mendacity beside him, providing consolation and reminding him he wasn’t alone. That help made an immeasurable distinction in Joseph’s emotional well-being throughout such a fragile time.”

Donnie has made the same impression on sufferers, together with Darren Yap, who has been hospitalized at Packard Kids’s for 11 months whereas awaiting coronary heart and kidney transplants. Donnie’s bond with Darren has supplied companionship and inspiration all through his keep, giving him one thing to sit up for. His face lights up when she enters the room, and he enthusiastically calls out, “Donnie!”

Donnie visits Darren a number of occasions per week as a necessary a part of his care staff. Her presence has helped him really feel extra comfy throughout procedures equivalent to echocardiograms and vaccinations and it has inspired him to take part in bodily and occupational remedy.

From early in Darren’s rehabilitation, Donnie was a robust motivator, serving to him progress from a couple of steps with a walker to strolling a full lap across the unit whereas holding her leash. Throughout their first remedy session collectively, Darren walked farther than he had in earlier periods.

On tougher days, Donnie makes motion really feel like play by actions like hide-and-seek. Their connection even impressed Darren and his music therapist, Dan Stafford, to jot down a tune known as “I Love Donnie.”

Helen Ybarra, Darren’s youngster life specialist, creates alternatives to assist him meet mobility objectives whereas constructing connections together with his care staff. From lemonade stands and boba bars to popcorn events, these actions encourage Darren to go away his room, transfer across the unit, and interact with employees members and different sufferers.

For Donnie’s retirement, that strategy took the type of a deal with bar with snacks, stickers, and balloons. Darren adorned his room and, with help from his care staff and Donnie by his facet, delivered treats all through the unit to have fun his buddy.

Celebrating an enduring legacy

Echo and Donnie marked their remaining day on the job with a retirement social gathering attended by sufferers, employees members, and this system’s different facility canines.

Sufferers who know Echo and Donnie joined the celebration carrying plush toys resembling the canines. The occasion additionally included a photograph sales space, video games, dog-themed snacks, and heartfelt remarks from Marchand and Giacalone.

Through the celebration, Sentivany-Collins obtained a plaque honoring her contributions to Packard Paws and recognizing the function that she and Carly performed in creating this system.

Though Echo and Donnie are retiring, Packard Paws continues to develop to satisfy the growing demand for facility canine help throughout scientific areas. This system’s six remaining canines, generously donated by Canine Companions, will carry ahead the legacy that Echo and Donnie helped create.

“Seeing what Packard Paws has grow to be—and figuring out that Echo and Donnie helped pave the way in which for the present and future canines who will proceed that work—is extremely significant to me,” Giacalone mentioned.

Though their service has come to an finish, Echo and Donnie’s impression will stay with the sufferers, households, and employees members whose lives they touched.

Packard Paws is overseen by the Child Life and Creative Arts Department and made doable fully by donor contributions. Particular due to the Lucile Packard Basis for Kids’s Well being for its help by Affiliation of Auxiliaries for Kids Endowment grants awarded in 2023 and 2026. The grants enabled the Packard Paws program to extend entry to facility canine interventions by 80%.