In 30 years as a mental health specialist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Paul Ingram cared for many young souls. In retirement, he returns to the hospital in a once-yearly video link, in St. Nicholas scarlet and fur, and he says he is the one who receives the gift.
First, the audience loves his routine, which includes a report on mischievous elves at the North Pole unable to resist the temptation to eat their face masks made of chocolate.
“It’s just so great. They just get so excited,” Ingram said.
Cincinnati Children’s released video highlights Wednesday of a Dec. 9 and 10 visit that Santa paid to 35 children individually by way of tablet computer. Ingram said he started doing Santa gigs when he retired from Cincinnati Children’s six years ago, and each year, he has returned to make video calls to children too sick for a face-to-face visit.
This year, Ingram said, the hospital’s Information Services team outdid itself. Tech people who more commonly hook up international medical calls dressed as elves to move Santa smoothly from room to room.
“They know that intellectually, they know that connecting this doctor in Sweden with a doctor in Cincinnati is helping,” Ingram said, “but it’s not the same as that direct contact, when you’re in the room with the child.”
Ingram said the technical team set up a teleprompter for him with information gathered from the hospital’s Child Life and Integrated Care tea so that Santa could make a personal connection. The other links in the chain include the hospital’s Center for Telehealth, its department of Interactive Services and technology providers Cisco and Encore Technologies.
Hospital spokesman Shannon Kettler said the majority of the children who got a virtual visit from Santa are cancer patients on long hospital stays. Often, Ingram said, the information on the teleprompter is scant, "but at least I know their names.”
He draws upon his work years to “try to assess pretty fast what’s going on with the kid. How much can I talk to the child? The parent? The elf?” Sometimes, the teleprompter says a sick child with a mother at bedside is living through a final Christmas. “I just to speak them, real softly, how you doing?”
But another child has a Christmas tree in his room. He's got a string of lights across his hospital bed. He is jumping up and down that Santa Claus found him and had a big ho ho ho just for him.
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