Where do your donations go? - Le Phare

Where do your donations go?

When you donate to Le Phare, you help us to provide the best of everything we can for sick children.

Quality clinical care

Our skilled clinical staff provides complex care to children with life-threatening illnesses in a warm, caring and supportive environment.

Our health care team includes a physician on call 24 hours a day, as well as always available nursing assistants, technicians and clinicians specializing in pediatric palliative care. We also have seasoned and dedicated orderlies who receive safe child handling training every two years. This ensures the continuity of complex care that children require throughout their stay. The care provided at Le Phare is guided by best practices and customized to ensure comprehensive biopsychosocial care for the child and family.

Bereavement support and follow-up

Le Phare offers parents and siblings the support they need to go through the various stages of life with a seriously ill child as serenely as possible. A social worker helps families cope with pain, fears, death and complex choices, and offers bereavement support.

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In-home respite

In-home respite is provided to families by specially trained staff members and volunteers who visit their home for three hours a week to care for their seriously ill child or teenager.

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Complementary therapies

A stay at Le Phare special experience that engages all the senses.

Arts activities

At Le Phare, everybody’s got talent! Experienced staff members ingeniously adapt to the children’s physical and cognitive abilities to allow them to actively take part in creative activities.

Multi-sensory activities

Our multi-sensory room is a source of tremendous joy. Our seasoned staff members work with the physical and cognitive limitations of the children to help them reap the benefits of the activities. The results are impressive and even children with seemingly little receptiveness experience sensory and motor stimulation, emotional arousal, improved brain plasticity, and pain relief.

A Mira dog at The Lighthouse

Benelux, the Mira Foundation’s service dog, gives emotional support to children at different times. Various studies have shown the benefits of a dog on the child, the family and the work team, including reduced stress and anxiety and increased social interaction.

Pets

The benefits of pet therapy have been clearly demonstrated over many years and studies. It awakens the senses and inspires love for those smaller and frailer than ourselves. An experienced pet therapist and a well-trained animal can ease the effects of the illness enough to stimulate and soothe the child immediately. Pet therapy has proven beneficial effects that include maintaining or improving gross and fine motor skills, facilitating communication, emotional expression and socialization, creating a meaningful bond, as well as improving relaxation and well-being.

Water

Children feel lighter in the therapeutic indoor pool. Often, children with multiple disabilities even feel like they can walk. For them, being in the pool is pure bliss.

Our seasoned staff members work with the physical and cognitive abilities of every child to ensure that their immediate stimulation and comforting needs are met. The results are impressive, even in children with seemingly little receptiveness resulting in deep proprioceptors stimulation, decreased muscle spasms and pain, increased body awareness, motor stimulation and improved respiratory capacity.

The pool, kept at a temperature of 37°C, offers multiple benefits. First, being immersed in the pool without braces enhances the body’s sensory stimulation. Plus, it makes massage therapy much easier. Furthermore, combined with the water’s calming effect, it works wonders, especially in patients with muscle spasms. The effect of weightlessness is another major benefit as it allows for movements that would otherwise be impossible to perform while lying on the back or standing.

Massage therapy

The benefits of massage therapy are impressive even in children with seemingly little receptiveness. Relieved muscle tension, reduced pain and anxiety, improved sleep quality, increased breathing amplitude and improved general well-being are only a few the benefits children experience. For children whose bodies can be a place of struggle and suffering, this soothing touch is a blessing that stimulates pleasant sensations, has a calming effect and helps restore the body’s completeness.

Music

Music therapy creates a three-party relationship where the therapist and music open a pathway to the child. Through music, the encounter is an invitation to self-expression that transcends physical and cognitive limitations and is a call to living in its purest and truest form.