HSHS St. Vincent Children’s Hospital welcomes first facility dog

GREEN BAY – HSHS St. Vincent Children’s Hospital recently became home to the region’s first facility dog, Munchkin, who provides support to children in all aspects of their hospital stay.

“She is the absolute best addition to our team,” said Child Life Specialist Shannon Kaufmann, who is Munchkin’s primary handler. “She helps support our pediatric patients wherever our child life team goes, so that could be our pediatric unit with our inpatient kids, that could be the ER, that could be pre-surgery, that could be imaging… We’re trying to integrate into a lot of those spaces where kids go, because who doesn’t want to see a dog, right?”

While one thing Munchkin does is offer therapeutic support, Kaufmann said her job goes above and beyond that of a therapy dog.

“We are different than a volunteer dog — Munchkin is a hospital facility dog,” she said. “Volunteer dogs some for an hour or two and they just do general visits. They go say hi, they jump on the bed, they do a trick and they leave and they go see both adult and pediatric patients in our hospital. Munchkin works 40 hours a week as an extension of our team and she goes with me on interactions. And those interactions are more than just a check-in and saying hi.

It’s being present for procedures and offering coping support. It’s doing a therapeutic activity and working on some of the different goals that we might have [for the patient] like expanding their creative expression or talking about self-esteem. It’s helping with goals that the medical team has. If one of the goals for a patient is to walk before they can leave and they have a goal to get down the hallway and back, Munchkin is right there next to them. We can help incentivize and encourage it without saying, ‘Let’s go walk down the hall and back,’ which can see really intimidating, we’ll throw [Munchkin] in the mix and say, ‘Let’s go take Munchkin for a walk,’ and that’s a lot less scary.”

Munchkin is the first facility dog in Northeast Wisconsin and one of only a handful of hospital facility dogs throughout the state.

She was trained by Canine Assistants in Milton, Georgia, before making her way to Kaufmann and HSHS St. Vincent’s Children’s Hospital in November.
And even in the short time she’s been there, Kaufmann said Munchkin’s already making a big impact.

“When most kids see a dog, they smile…” she said. “The minute she comes into the room, the kid lights up. My goal as a child-life specialist is to normalize the hospital and she is an A+, five-star example of that.”