Faculty Advisor(s)
Lori Charney
Abstract
Children experiencing chronic conditions or life-threatening diseases are at a significantly greater risk of having poor mental health, with symptoms including anxiety, depression, aggression, physical impairment, and problems with academics and socialization (Nijhof et al., 2018). The Let’s Go Play project focuses on program development and education to provide children with disabilities opportunities to play. Play is an important occupation that children engage in. Play is a way that children learn new things, including developing resiliency, overcoming challenges, cooperating, and negotiating with others in a social sense. This program includes weekly video modules on hospital play and switch-adapted toys. This includes how to adapt the environment for play, ways to engage in play with precautions, adapting the play activity, and how to create social opportunities, as well as information about the switch adaptation process. This program provides educational materials on how to adapt play for these children so that they can have a positive experience with play during a difficult time. The education component involves providing training to parents, occupational therapists, health care practitioners, and students. This includes in-person sessions on switch-adapted toys. These seminars taught families, occupational therapists, and students how to manually switch adapted toys for children with complex medical needs to make toys more accessible. Switch adapted toys are one option to improve play opportunities for children with medical complexities that require switch adapted toys. Parents say that their children use switch adapted play to engage in both independent play and social play. Teaching more people about switch adapted toys will allow more children to access play. Social play was also in this project addressed during the Sensory Social Lego® Group that the capstone student hosted for autistic children. Play was adapted for the participants by using Legos® to encourage social participation with other children in the group.
Publication Date
2026
Document Type
Poster
Department
Occupational Therapy
Keywords
occupational therapy, play, adapted, hospital, disabilities
Disciplines
Medicine and Health Sciences | Occupational Therapy | Rehabilitation and Therapy
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Merriman, Haleigh J., "Let's Go Play: Creating Adaptive Play Opportunities for Children" (2026). Entry Level Occupational Therapy Doctoral Capstone Projects Class of 2026. 8.
https://digitalcommons.misericordia.edu/otd_capstone2026/8