June Visit

June Visit

Today we visited the North Block of the hospital and met Maria who will be looking after the Junior Carers from now on. It was lovely to meet her but also it was sad to say good bye to Rachel and we would like to say a big thank-you to her for all her hard work in organising all of our visits to the hospital.

Our first session today was all about Heart Health. We met Jamie Marie, a Senior Nurse, who told us all about the heart. Did you know...

The heart beats around 100,000times each day and pumps around 5 litres of blood through a network of blood vessels delivering oxygen and nutrients to all parts of the body and helps your organs and muscles to work properly.
The first organ to shut down is the digestive system and the last organ to shut down is the HEART.
The fairy fly has the smallest heart.
The whale has the largest heart of any mammal.
A woman's heart beats slightly faster than a man's heart.
Laughing is good for the heart. It reduces stress and boosts the immune system.

To find out more about the heart watch the video below:

The Human Body: The Heart | Educational Videos For Kids

We took part in various activities relating to heart health but our favourite was using the stethoscope to listen to our heart beat.

Our next session was all about 'Research in Healthcare'. We started off by picking an emoji from a bag. We then had to move to the table with that emoji. This was to help us understand 'randomisation', a process used in research for assigning people into different groups.

We then had great fun playing 'Research Bingo' where we learned a lot of terminology and what it meant through the game. We were all given bingo cards and we sometimes had to find the words and other times we were giving definitions and had to find the words that matched.

We were then shown a video to help us understand clinical trials that you can watch too if you would like to know more.

Understanding Clinical Trials (7-12 Year Olds)

We then watched a video about a clinical trial in the hospital relating to broken wrists where some people are chosen to have their wrist plastered and allow the wrist to heal while others are chosen to have an operation to put the bones back into place.