Child Life Specialists
The Child Life team at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center provides coping support for children and families facing stressful health care situations.
When your child needs care or a medical procedure at the hospital, child life specialists provide support and advocate for your child’s developmental and emotional needs.
Child life specialists partner with your family and your child’s entire care team to ease your family’s way.
Child life specialists are experts in the developmental and psychological impact of illness and injury on children. Each specialist earns a bachelor’s degree at minimum in child development or another closely related field and maintains a nationally accredited certification.
At Providence, our child life team helps children and families cope with health care experiences that can be stressful. Services we offer for children include:
- Addressing when a child has difficulty cooperating with medicine or treatments
- Calming a child who is significantly distressed or fearful
- Coping with and preparing for medical procedures, surgery or tests
- Facilitating a visit with a family member who is in the hospital and providing support before and after the visit
- Helping a child use non-medicinal pain management techniques
- Offering age-appropriate play or therapeutic activities
- Support for a child and their family after a new diagnosis, injury or illness
- Support for any child dealing with the death of a loved one
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The Child Life Internship Program at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center offers a comprehensive, 600 hour Child Life internship program open to college or university-affiliated students seeking certification as a Child Life Specialist.
Students are offered extensive and varied opportunities to meet the standards set forth by the Certifying Committee of the ACLP (Association of Child Life Professionals). Internships at PSVMC are offered to one student per term in Fall and Spring. We follow the ACLP internship curriculum and recommended deadlines for application submissions.
Our program accepts the Internship Readiness Common Application found on the ACLP website: ACLP Internship Readiness Common Application.
Once complete, submit applications for review to orpsvclsinternship@providence.org
The email subject line should state the internship session (Fall or Spring) and year.
The PDF downloaded as part of the ACLP Internship Readiness Common Application is the only component that will be reviewed. No additional documentation will be required or reviewed for a candidate’s initial submission (no letters of recommendation, cover letters, resumes, etc.).
Frequently Asked Questions
We offer one internship opportunity in the Fall (August-December) and one in the Spring (January-April).
We accept applications at any time but use the ACLP suggested dates for submission deadlines and offer extension.
Yes, we review the first 50 applications submitted.
Yes. We can’t accept applications from individuals not associated with an academic institution. (Your academic institution doesn’t necessarily need to be associated with our hospital as we have a process to obtain association after an offer has been extended and accepted.)
We require only the ACLP internship readiness common application with school transcripts included.
We want to get a sense of your experience and understanding regarding the child life profession. We are looking for specific examples of experiences or interventions you have had with children both within healthcare and outside of healthcare. We want to see you connect those experiences to Child Life knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) and reference the KSA associated. We use a rubric to score all applications to maintain as much consistency and equality as possible.
Because we have so many applications to review, small mistakes showing lack of following directions or filling out application incorrectly will remove a candidate from the running.
We respond to all applicants after the application submission date has passed to let them know whether they have been selected for an interview.
We will select 20 applicants for an initial round of interviews via short phone conversations. This includes just a few questions to help us learn more about you and your knowledge base. This conversation usually takes 5-10 minutes. We then select the top 10 applicants for 30-minute virtual interviews with our team.
We follow ACLP guidelines for offer and acceptance dates. We realize that you as a student also need to find an internship that fits your goals so we may offer an internship to an applicant that accepts elsewhere. If this is the case, we will continue to move through our list of applicants and offer until we find placement and a good fit.
Our internship consists of 3 equal rotations (usually about 5 weeks) with each of our 3 Child Life Specialists. We have a pediatric service line within an adult hospital so through your rotations you will gain experience on a 20-bed inpatient pediatric unit, a 4-bed pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), pediatric surgery, pediatric imaging and radiology, the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), outpatient lab, and children of adult patients throughout the hospital.
We structure our internship this way because we believe that each of us bring our own personality, style, and experience to our work as Child Life Specialists and this can be beneficial for students who are working to establish their own unique character and style in their work. We also believe that students benefit from a range of experiences and service areas so try to prioritize student encounters in each of the areas we cover. We will often prioritize children of adult patients and bereavement support encounters for students as these are often supportive of overall learning goals.
Our interns follow each of our schedules when doing a rotation with us, so it varies, but is always 4 days a week, daytime hours, and no weekend coverage.
Our ultimate goal is for our students to feel independent, confident, and ready to take (and crush) the certification exam. With this goal in mind, we start each rotation with observation and then move quickly towards independence in providing Child Life interventions and interactions. We will at times push students when we believe they are ready, but we are still there each step of the way to provide support, encouragement, and feedback.
We utilize the ACLP internship learning modules, and the associated assignments. We have all the books for required and optional reading available for students to utilize throughout the internship. We require weekly journaling regarding experiences because we believe it helps students to reflect on encounters and progress over the internship, and beyond which assists in learning and will be helpful for when it comes time to take the exam. Unlike many internships we do not require a final project. Sometimes a need arises, or a student has a specific passion, and one naturally may come about, but it is not a requirement for completion.
Our interns have weekly check-ins with the internship coordinator where successes, challenges, and goals are discussed. Each internship supervisor provides timely feedback and welcomes questions throughout each shift. We complete three evaluations, one after each rotation to mark progress and areas of future focus. Due to the consistent connection points with our intern, this information should never be a surprise, but a reflection of communication along the way. Each member of our team is committed to your growth, and we want you to succeed!
Providence Children's Health of Oregon
Providence Children’s Health is a leader in caring for kids, serving tens of thousands of children in Oregon each year. We offer everything from routine primary care to emergency and hospital care – for newborns, children and teens.
We understand that children’s bodies and minds react differently than adults to injury, illness, medications and therapy. Our compassionate teams do everything they can to give your child the best possible experience.
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