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Feel good Friday's

Activities for parents and family are just as important for overall wellbeing as those for the kids, so Latch provides a relaxation session for families on the final Friday of each month.

On the last Friday of each month, Latch invites a wellness practitioner into the offices to provide sessions for families currently undergoing treatment on Rainbow Ward. The sessions, which last about half an hour, provide a space for families to step away from the ward, take a moment to breathe, rest, and reset.

The two practitioners are Julie, a massage therapist, and Virginia, a reiki practitioner and reflexologist, and we had a chance to sit down and speak with them about the services they provide to Latch families, and the effects that their work has had.

 

Can you explain a bit more about the work you do?

Julie: So, massage therapy, you are working directly on the body. You’re mainly looking at the muscles and their tightness, and then physically trying to get into muscle fibres, lengthen them, or get them moving better. There’s lots of different techniques you can use, whether that's kind of a smoothing motion, leaning, or compressing the muscle, to try and encourage the muscle to relax, which along with the muscle relaxing can help increase blood flow to an area, or help someone’s nervous system to down regulate, and just encourage the whole body to breathe out.

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Virginia: Reflexology works on the same principal as acupuncture, so stimulating nerve ending, but without the needles. It’s a bit like a foot massage, but rather than work the muscles you work the nerve endings, you stimulate them and encourage blood flow around the body and helps people relax. And Reiki is about channelling the bodies energy. You know, it might be that you feel the energy around an area of the body that feels a bit heavy, and so I work to try and push it away and send it back to earth. And neither are medicine, they’ll never cure anything, but they both encourage deep relaxation.

 

Why do you do the work you do?

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Julie: I kind of fell into massage therapy, I tagged along with a friend to this short reflexology course when I was doing my A levels, and that got me interested in touch therapy. And I think it just always felt good and intuitive, you know, putting your hands on someone and then feeling for that tension, being able to make people feel better, being able to help, even if it's in a small way of, and having someone say, “oh, that pain feels much better and I feel like I can move easier”. I like that I can help.

Virginia: My youngest had a lot of stomach issues growing up, and the cause wasn’t just medical, there was a lot of emotional causes, and I looked into holistic ways to help her alongside whatever the doctors recommended. And when I had cancer a number of years ago, I had Reiki and reflexology all the way through my treatment, and I genuinely believe that my treatment would have been 10 times worse if I hadn’t had it.

How does your specific work help Latch children and their families?

Julie: I think it's a little bit of breathing space for families. I think physically coming into that room and allowing themselves to shut the door and have half an hour away. And then also, they've been sleeping on a bed that's not theirs, they're stuck in the hospital, they are stressed, they are sore, and it just gives them a minute.

Their muscles are tense, they’re under incredible emotional strain, and their nervous system is all jacked up because they're constantly in a state of stress. I can't fix that, but I can give their body and their mind a little space. Feeling like I make a small, a tiny, tiny difference to just their day is a nice thing.

Virginia: A slightly more relaxed parent will have that knock-on effect with their child and other family members. It's promoting that calmness that feeling of “okay, in this moment, I'm okay. I can do this. I've got the strength to move forward.”  And that has a knock-on effect on everybody else. You're not going to cure anything, but in that moment, it gives that parent the time, allow them to say it is okay to switch off, to stop that stress button, to reset just for half an hour.

 

We're so grateful to Julie and Virginia for their support and the positive impacts that their work has on families, helping Latch provide wrap around care and support, ensuring families can focus on their treatment journey.