I have been very fortunate to join the Full Circle Fund Therapies team offering Reiki to support very sick children and adults, their carers and staff in areas of critical need at St George’s Hospital, SW London. The training has been delivered from a clinical perspective in an acute medical setting and has been all in-hospital. The next phase of fundraising will be for trials and clinical research, much needed to prove how effective Reiki is in this acute setting.
From Suzie Ruggles, Director/Founder of Full Circle Fund Therapies:
“On behalf of Full Circle Fund Therapies, which proudly hosts ‘Connecting Reiki with Medicine’ at St George’s Hospital, I would like to say how delighted I am at the development of this project. Full Circle works in some of the most acute areas of need, from bone marrow transplantation, to the cancer wards to intensive care. It goes without saying that people who are receiving life saving medical treatment are coping with enormous levels of stress and uncertainty. They are not only trying to navigate an often frightening and unfamiliar clinical environment, but also they are trying to cope with all the fears and uncertainties surrounding their diagnosis and the rigours of medical treatment and its side effects. People in the environments in which we work are at their most vulnerable and it is why, here at Full Circle, we have always felt there is a critical need to provide professional, caring, and meaningful support to provide a therapeutic space that helps each person find their inner calmness and resilience to endure what is ahead of them. For Full Circle, supporting the whole person in the intensive clinical environment is the central reason our charity exists.
The NHS is a challenging and highly complex environment and it has taken slow and painstaking steps to get each of our projects and each of our therapies introduced and then accepted. With this in mind, when I was first asked to meet with Melanie Glanville and some of her Reiki colleagues, it was notable for me that the introduction was made by a senior cancer and transplant nurse, good friend and Reiki practitioner, Laura O’Regan. As a nurse she would see first hand, the real need. I had worked with Laura in the hospital’s haematology and transplant unit for over 10 years and she had seen Full Circle develop from its inception to supporting over 7,000 children, teenagers and adults. We had the same vision.
I have great respect for Reiki and energy medicine in all its formats. We became the ‘Connecting Reiki with Medicine’ project as I wanted to do what I could to help provide a platform for Reiki, and to help it to be introduced safely into our intensive clinical world. We set about structuring a framework which included an extensive mentoring and induction programme, which then would involve an extended shadowing phase so that cleared Reiki practitioners could observe the complexities of delivering a service in this environment from one of our lead clinical practitioners.
I am thrilled to say that we now have four very special Reiki practitioners – Melanie Glanville, Raquel Martin, Anne-Marie Carratu and Teresa Durant who have passed through our in-depth induction and mentoring process with exemplary care, professionalism and compassion. We follow closely our different patient groups, which we do through service evaluation, and through this process we have the ability to start to see themes emerging. It is this systematic process that enables us to be directed to where we can focus possible future research projects.”
Support us
I am honoured to have been able to introduce Reiki into the Full Circle Fund Therapies’ fold.
We see so much need. We have so much more we can do. To use a building analogy, the plans are drawn, the foundations are strong, the ‘building’ is in place. We hope you will come to help us complete this work.
If you would like to donate to this incredible project, then please use the link below:
https://www.totalgiving.co.uk/charity/full-circle-fund-therapies
