DREAMING BIG
Television studio opens for Children’s Hospital inpatients
In January 2016, UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh started a fundraising campaign aiming to raise enough money to build an in-house television studio for use by patients, along with other art and music therapy facilities.
Four years later, “Dream Big Studio” went live.
In the atrium on the sixth floor of Children’s on Thursday, child life specialist Riley Hammond hosted the first show, leading a craft activity and interviewing Dominic DiAndreth, 7, and Levi Radovich, 9, as they decoupaged a “dream jar.”
They talked as they stuck tissue paper to the wet paste they’d painted on their jars, projected on a massive screen in the atrium, as well as on Channel 1 on the closed-circuit television sets in hospital rooms.
“What kind of color do you think you’ll get to do on your jar?” Ms. Hammond asked Dominic, of Delmont, who had an orange nasal cannula taped under his nose.
“All the colors!” he answered, pasting more tissue on the jar.
Dominic, who had been in the hospital for two days, had been telling nurses and everyone else how excited he would be to go on television, said his mom, Jennifer DiAndreth, who was thankful for the distraction.
“It’s just amazing that this is another opportunity to just brighten the kids’ days, give them experiences away from all the medicine and sometimes the yuckiness that they have to face,” she said. “I thought it was an awesome experience.”
Research shows that “video therapy,” also with other types of art and music therapy and creative play, can help children heal faster, said Ms. Hammond, who moved to Pittsburgh from Texas specifically to run the Dream Big Studio, which was funded by a donation from the Rossin Foundation.
“There are measurable results to kids having the opportunity to play,” she said. “This is just another extension of that through radio and TV.”
She is particularly excited about the ability of the television studio to reach kids who are in isolation units or otherwise unable to leave their rooms. She envisions call-in radio shows where one child is the DJ while others call in song requests, or where patients can call from their rooms to interview celebrity guests in studio.
“When we have special events out in the atrium or in other spaces in our hospital, we’re reaching maybe 5% or 10% of the kids who are here,” she said.
“With Dream Big Studio, this really give us the opportunity for all kids to engage in some way.”
She also has set up programming in the coming months for community members to host shows on topics such as robots, science and cookie decorating.
And she hopes that more ideas will come from the patients themselves.
“If a child comes to us and says, ‘I want to host a slime show about making four different types of slime,’ we’re going to make that happen, so their dream can be a reality for them,” she said.
The studio will be staffed during weekday business hours for use by all inpatients at the hospital, whether they want to be on-air talent, operate a camera or work behind the scenes on the production side.
For the talent on the inaugural show, the best part for Dominic was getting to use a “popping gun” on air that sprayed confetti. For Levi, of Saxonburg, who sat next to him and said he hoped to one day interview the Steelers’ Juju Smith-Schuster, there was no one particular highlight.
“It was just fun,” he said.