Pooling money
Children’s Center Rehabilitation Hospital raises funds to revive its aquatic therapy program.
Hidden away in a small room within The Children’s Center Rehabilitation Hospital lies an old, wooden aboveground pool with the words “pool closed” strung across the stairs.
The pool, once used for aquatic therapy, has been nonoperational for over a year now because the pool is old enough that the parts for it cannot be found anymore, said Amber Searle, the hospital’s therapy manager.
Now the hospital is raising money to revive its aquatic therapy program and build a new pool.
“We see that there is a need that we are not able to help with right now, and there’s not a lot of places for kids to go and get this service in the Oklahoma City metro area,” Searle said. “So if we can provide that, then we can expand our reach that much further.”
In her 19 years as a therapist at the hospital, Searle has seen water’s rehabilitative properties first hand.
The hospital takes in kids with a wide range of conditions, Searle said. Often times they are born with kinetic or congenital diseases or disorders. Some children at the hospital have been in traumatic accidents, resulting in brain or spinal cord injury, she said; but a good majority of these children would benefit from aquatic therapy.
“There are things that these kids can’t do on land that maybe they could do in the pool, and also being in the pool will help them strengthen and carry over those things on land,” Searle said.
Searle said she once had a child come in with a spinal cord injury that completely prevented him from standing or walking.
“He had siblings and friends who were out and about doing all of these things, so he was just pretty discouraged,” Searle said.
The old pool still was operational at the time, so Searle said she eventually
made the decision to let him try it out.
“He actually scared us because I remember him diving under water, and that’s just not something that we were used to doing,” Searle said. “But he could by himself, he could feel like his old body in the water.”
Searle said aquatic therapy was a turning point in the child’s rehabilitation and often has been for other children, as well.
With the hospital’s old pool, they were able to serve about 25 percent of their patients in aquatic therapy, Searle said. A new pool would be able to accommodate about 75 percent of the hospital’s inpatients.
The new pool would feature many innovative devices that the older pool lacked in order to accommodate more patients, such as an adjustable treadmill floor, five video cameras and a screen for monitoring, Searle said. The pool also would be inground, rather than aboveground.
Heidi Russell, The Children’s Center Rehabilitation Hospital senior vice president of communications and development, said the total cost for a new pool is going to be about $737,000.
As of now the hospital has raised about $137,000, Russell said. The goal is to complete fundraising by spring 2019 so that they can execute a contract with HydroWorx, a company that specializes in building aquatic therapy pools, and get started on construction.
“We don’t want to get the pool started until we have full funding,” Russell said.
Building a new pool is a going to require a lot of work, Russell said, but aquatic therapy is necessary in order for the hospital to continue accommodating a growing number of patients.
“It’s a pretty big project,” Russell said. “In order to continue providing innovative, excellent care that we have here, we have to have a pool.”