Yahoo Lifestyle 
Hospital lets kids drive themselves to surgery
A children’s hospital has come up with the perfect way to help reduce stress levels in young patients, who are faced with having to go into surgery.
Rather than having to be wheeled in on a bed, why not let them ‘drive’ themselves to the operating room?
Adorable images from the Children’s Hospital of the Zhejiang University School of Medicine showing children heading off in their cars to surgery.
A boy named Xiaoyuan, five, can be seen heading to the operating theatre in the blue convertible, which has a BMW label on it.
The hospital in Hangzhou, does some 34,000 surgeries a year - or nearly 100 each day - and the remote-controlled cars reportedly go a long way to helping the children settle their nerves.
The children are led along the corridors by a nurse, who holds the toy car’s controller in their hands, leading the kids all the way to the operating theatre.
Xiaoyuan is said have loved the car so much that he refused to leave the ‘driver’s seat’ while receiving his anaesthesia.
Nurses had to wait until he fell asleep to carry him onto the operating table for his inguinal hernia surgery.
Five-year-old Linlin also enjoying riding the blue BMW convertible into surgery to have her tonsils removed.
Zhang Weifang, who works as a secretary at the hospital, said the car is part of the facility’s international-standard ‘child life services’ programme, which has been offered to 1,461 kids since the end of February this year.
Besides allowing kids to ‘drive’ themselves to surgery, the programme also focuses on other aspects of their mental well-being by providing a children’s library and play area, all of which help to reduce the young patients’ stress levels leading up and after an operation.
"In 2006 while visiting the Loma Linda University Medical Center in the United States, I noticed medical staff and parents playing games with a child who was to have a lumbar puncture," Zhang said.
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