International Scholarship Recipients

International Scholarship Recipients 2021

• Priscila Flores Carrillo

  
  I was born and raised in Quito - Ecuador and I am 28 years old. I'm a Nursing Assistant, Occupational Therapist, and Child Life Professional. I studied my degree of Nursing Assistant and my degree in Occupational Therapy in Ecuador, and I graduated with a Masters of Child Life in Barcelona, Spain. In my hospital practices I worked with children, adolescents, and their families, also, with children with special abilities, others apparently healthy, also populations with various diseases and disorders. 
  
  I was a volunteer in a dialysis clinic, and after I started to work with young patients, adults, and older adults, also in gerontological centers, and home therapies, I have always tried to transpose what I studied in therapy and in my masters program, provide beneficial psychosocial care for all my patients, trying to work in all spheres of children and in other patients, providing quality care for their emotions with tools such as games, music therapy, art therapy, clown therapy, correct education of illness, among other resources, for adequate empowerment and coping with the circumstances that must be faced. 
  
  Today, due to the critical situation worldwide, in the absence of opportunities to work in the public and private sector in my country, I decided to open my rehabilitation clinic, where I provide my services to the child, adolescent, adult and elderly population. In my treatments I always to apply the child life principles, giving priority to emotions, feelings and spirituality, to start from an empathic and compassionate therapy. 
  
  In addition, Occupational Therapy and Nursing are professions that can be combined with the Child Life Profession, and for me this is very positive, because I can make my three professions merge, with the objective of providing better structured and higher quality services to infants, adolescents and their families and other patients.  

• Nicola Mooney

  
  My Hospital Play career now spans about 16 years, including my work in the 1990’s at the Royal London in Whitechapel. I was able to attend the first day release Hospital Play course run at Southbank College. After qualifying and immigrating to Sydney, I worked for six years as a Paediatric Occupational Therapist for a charity organization. This was predominantly working with children who were struggling at school, doing standardized assessments.

  I gravitated back to Play in Hospital and have now worked in Sydney Children’s Hospital for the last nine years.  Here, I have worked in a variety of different clinical areas, including: Neurology, Orthopedics, and in Medical Imaging. I have worked the last 18 months on our Intensive Care Ward and our Medical Day Unit.

• Kristina Silfvenius

  
  I come from Helsinki, Finland, and have worked at Helsinki University Children´s Hospital as a Child Life Specialist. There I participated in founding Child Life Specialists I Finland.

  As a Rotary Foundation Scholar, I spent a year working at Vancouver Children´s Hospital in Canada at the Child Life Department and studied special education at UBC, University of British Columbia.

  In 1987 I moved to Stockholm, Sweden and worked at Astrid Lindgren Children´s Hospital, Karolinska University Hospital. There I was on the board for Child Life Specialists in Sweden for many years.
  
  I have been working with diverse diagnoses, with in- and outpatients in all age groups, helping children and adolescents preparing them for different kinds of procedures, and helping to promote coping strategies and minimizing the adverse effects of hospitalization and health care encounters. Providing interventions that include therapeutic play, expressive modalities, and psychological preparation to facilitate coping and normalization.
  
  Now I mainly work with the burns patients in the outpatient clinic, and as inpatients, and I'm part of the burns team.

  Within the hospital and outside I actively promote and inform about Children’s Rights according to the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, that is a legal right in Sweden since Jan 2019.

  In 2015 I joined Operation Smile and have had the opportunity to go on 12 missions in different parts of the world as a Child Life Specialist. The last mission was in Oujda, Morocco. A fantastic opportunity to promote children´s rights. I have been part of the medical adviser board for Operation Smile Sweden and I am now a Psychosocial Advisor on the Psychosocial Medical Advisory Council (MAC) Operation Smile International.