Paediatric psychology

Clinical Psychologists are trained in the understanding of how people thinks, feel and behave, and in the Paediatric Psychology Service our job is to help children and families cope with the psychological aspects of health and illness.

What we offer

The way we work is to start by talking with children and/or their parents to try and work out how best we can help.  Sometimes we will meet several times, or we may only need to meet once or twice. We see people either as out-patients or when they are in hospital.  People come to us for lots of reasons, for example anxiety about hospital procedures; coping with pain; trauma following an accident; effects of the illness on family members; stress related symptoms and management of children in hospital.

It can be easy to get anxious when you are not well, and sometimes being anxious, stressed or worried can make you unwell in the first place. In the Paediatric Psychology team we support children and their families with issues around illness, accidents and anxiety. We work to help children and families identify triggers that make them anxious. Then we would find techniques to help manage the anxiety or worry.

Often facing our fears helps us to realise they are not quite as scary as we first thought, and over time we can get used to things we used to be very frightened of, such as injections or a medical procedure, or even coming to see the doctor in the first place. However we can’t do that unless we have some techniques to help us manage the feelings we get when faced with something like this.

Relaxation tracks

The following tracks can be used in 2 ways to help manage anxiety, stress or worry. Firstly they can be used to practice relaxation, which is a way of learning to feel in control of our body and finding out about calming down. Practicing every night before bed or first thing in the morning, gets our body used to being in a calm state. They can also be used when we have to do something anxiety provoking. Just listening to a track on the way to the hospital, or when we are in the waiting room can help us to keep calm and not let anxiety overwhelm us.

Track 1 – De-Stress Exercise

Track 2 – Tension and relaxation Exercise

Track 3 – Breathing Exercise

There are also some great apps out there which have more tools. Check out Mindshift for example, which is free and has relaxation tracks and much more.