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Therapeutic Entertainment Component
Rx Laughter Hospital Network
The Rx Laughter Hospital Network brings quality, carefully selected and age-appropriate comedy films and classic television programs to patients & their families within health care settings to help the patient through their anxiety & fear, alienation & isolation during medical procedures.
We all have a favorite movie - something that makes us smile or laugh when we think about it. Sharing our memories about that movie & the good times surrounding it can offer peace, comfort & closure in ways that we may not fully understand scientifically, but which we can all relate to intuitively.
 Our ongoing vision of Rx Laughter focuses on advancing a more nurturing, warmer, humanistic, personalized relationship between the health care setting & the patient in what is an otherwise very frightening, alienating & depressing environment. We want to add our creative & managerial resources to do this in the best & most realistic way possible, working within the health care setting in a collaborative, flexible manner that understands & complies with the priorities for the patient & medical team in all circumstances.
We have implemented the Rx Laughter Hospital Network at the Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA including the Hematology-Oncology Critical Isolation & Intensive Care Units, showing carefully chosen movies to these patients, personalized as much as possible, with program evaluations based upon ongoing feedback from the patient, family & health care specialists. Successfully launched, we are refining this pilot project and adding volunteer staff to liaison between the hospital & Rx Laughter.
Expansion in the Fall of 2005 also includes a pilot stage project where these children can interact with their friends (& other patients, if they wish) as they laugh & enjoy the funny movies together (simulating the experience of sharing the fun of laughing with others in a movie theatre, to some degree).
Hospice patients from childhood to old age are in desperate need of better end of life spiritual care. Nurses, Social Workers, Child Life Specialists and physicians deeply wish to be able to offer these Hospice patients an opportunity for emotional and spiritual comfort in appropriate, personalized and very compassionate ways.
As such, we have begun discussions with an Adult Hospice to design & implement a training program for Volunteers as to how best to use movies & funny. Volunteer Coordinators work with Rx Laughter to design and implement this project for a Winter 2006 launch.
We are excited about the possibilities that may exist in technology to implement a centralized system with Rx Laughter for patients in Isolation, Intensive Care & critical outpatient clinics so that they may view a customized selection of funny movies & programs during their medical treatments and for their end of life care.
Thus, we are entering discussions with select technology & entertainment industry sectors to learn practical, appropriate ways to potentially expand this network to people of all ages in all treatment areas at selected health care settings such as Hospitals & Hospice for pediatric patients & adults nationwide.
-Contact RxLproject@aol.com or via phone at 805 927-4197.
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