“I love it when Child Life Therapy come, because it helps me forget I am sick.” 8 year old long term patient.

Camp Quality provides essential support to Oncology Child Life Therapists (CLT) across the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network. These CLTs support children and their families every step of the way throughout their cancer journey.

The Child Life Therapy service in the Kids Cancer Centre (Randwick) and Cancer Centre for Children (Westmead) continues to aim for holistic care and to advocate for all children with a cancer or blood disorder diagnosis, or undergoing a bone marrow transplant, and their families and siblings.

Child Life Therapy provides a comprehensive service including procedural education and support, medical play, therapeutic and developmental activities, and cognitive refocusing strategies with the aim of decreasing anxiety and making being in hospital and going through treatment a much less stressful experience.

Camp Quality has also provided invaluable support to the Beads of Courage program at Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick for many years. Through this partnership, they have provided emotional and psychological support, a little silver lining for seriously ill children and their families during the toughest of times. 

These unique beads represent a procedure, milestone or challenge overcome and, when joined together, create a string of beads which tells the story of each child’s personal and medical journey. There are dozens of different beads, each one marking a different procedure or event such as dialysis, chemotherapy, blood tests, biopsies, radiation therapy, IV insertions and more.

The beads become both a powerful coping tool and an incredibly special memento for the child and their family, and a symbol of pride and courage for all the challenges that they have overcome.

“Adding some magic and taking away some of the pain” Parent of child with cancer. 

Direct feedback from families highlights the importance of the beads in expressing their long and relentless journey to family and friends who previously did not understand. A long string of beads, each indicating a significant, difficult, or painful procedure, gives the child a physical, visual representation of a journey which is otherwise very hard to articulate.

Since 1995, Camp Quality have provided an incredible $1.5million towards Child Life Therapy and the Beads of Courage Program. Thank you, Camp Quality, for your support in helping kids and families build optimism and resilience throughout their cancer experience.