Hospital clothing is no fun, particularly if you’re a kid or a teenager who wants to express your identity through your style.
So to help kids feel more like themselves while undergoing treatment, Starlight Children’s Foundation Canada came up with the AMAZING idea of teaming with top designers to create supercool hospital gowns they’d be proud to don.
According to the WARD + ROBES initiative, “Teens are unique. Why should their hospital gowns be any different?”
Piloting the project, Starlight gave 100 gowns to kids at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario – and it was an immediate success.
“Seeing the smiles, hearing the giggles, watching the excitement… I knew we had to bring this program to as many hospitalized teens in Canada as possible,” Trevor Dicaire, senior vice president of development at Starlight told Buzzfeed News.
“It’s not easy being a teen and it’s even tougher to be a teen suffering with a serious illness. We felt this was a perfect program to provide them with a sense of hope, empowerment and individuality. ”
And of course we shed a tear or two (or fifty) watching the video of the children’s reactions.
“It feels like I’m myself,” said one teen. It doesn’t feel like I’m in a hospital anymore.”
While another added: “When I first saw the new gowns I saw empowerment in teenagers. I feel like myself in it. How I’m supposed to feel.”
Starlight now hopes to roll out WARD + ROBES to hospitals all across Canada.
We think this is a wonderful way to make the lives of these kids better. They are going through so much at a difficult age in their lives, so anything that helps them feel like normal kids can never be underestimated.
