Much like any other four-year-old boy, Jake Morgan darts around one of Great Ormond Street Hospital’s playrooms leaving a small trail of destruction in his wake.

But in between the distractions, he inserts an intravenous needle into the arm of an Elmo cuddly toy. Little older than a toddler, Jake should be learning how to tie his shoelaces. Instead he is being shown how a drip is attached to a patient ahead of major surgery.

The brave boy, from Barnet, was diagnosed with a rare inherited kidney disease before he was born. He needs a transplant, which means a lengthy operation and possibly weeks — including Christmas — in hospital recovering.

Play specialist Lynsey Steele is responsible for making sure Jake understands what is going to happen to him. Her role is funded by the Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity.

Helping play specialists continue their work is a key plank of the Standard’s Give to GOSH Christmas Appeal, which also aims to support other efforts to make life as normal as possible for families while children are in hospital.

Lynsey’s job is a careful balancing act. On the one hand Jake is only four, with limited powers of comprehension. On the other, if anything comes as a shock to him when he is wheeled into theatre, there is a real risk that his discomfort may jeopardise the operation.

The 33-year-old, who has worked at Great Ormond Street for seven years, treads this tightrope by using play. For Jake, hospital visits are “sleepovers”, swabs for infection control are “tickling sticks”, and anything that involves needles is a “box job” — a term the boy coined himself because of the small sealed plastic containers they come in.

Under Lynsey’s practised supervision he is encouraged to model parts of the surgery he will receive next Tuesday. In addition to handling a needle, he uses a yellow pen to colour in a “wee-wee bag” he will be temporarily connected to in the days after his operation. At another point, he prods a “tickling stick” in the nostrils of a Sheriff Callie teddy bear. Without this work, sick children would spend some of the toughest days of their lives “anxious, scared and confused”, according to Lynsey.

“Without play specialists I think the kids would become very bored very quickly,” she said. “If they didn’t have access to play, to toys, to normalise their experience, it would then have a big impact on their compliance with their treatments.

“There would probably be a lot of kids that would be refusing to comply with blood tests and cannulas and refusing their operations because they don’t know what’s going on.”

She said one of the hardest parts of her job was supporting patients who are struggling to cope with their dialysis, and want to be just like their friends and not have kidney failure.

For Jake’s mother Samantha, 39, the difference Lynsey has made is huge. “When Jake came in here was absolutely terrified,” she said.

“We couldn’t really get him into the ward. Just being on the ward he was so anxious. And Lynsey’s shown him that it’s a comfortable place to be. She’s turned the whole experience of being here into a game. We come for sleepovers, we don’t come to stay in hospital. He comes excited to see Lynsey. So that first bit when he gets in is so different.

“We used to be at the front door and he’d be screaming.”

On the role of play in treatment, Dr Kanchan Rao — a specialist in paediatric bone marrow transplant at GOSH — said she was “certain” it had a positive effect on the clinical outcomes of her patients.

She said: “Play and play therapy plays a crucial role in what we do here at GOSH. We see time and time again that a happy and relaxed patient will recover quicker after a setback.

“Every time that we survey or speak to parents the power of play is right up there in terms of what parents care about. They know that play is vital in keeping children stimulated.”

DONATENOW