Meet Katya, our new Music Therapist

18 Apr 2019, 3:03 p.m.

Music Therapist Katya

"My job is to help young people to find joy, resilience, self-expression, and empowerment through music. I can’t think of a better place to do that than at Great Ormond Street Hospital", says Katya, our first full-time Music Therapist.Music therapy is the clinical use of music interventions to help patients reach their physical, emotional, cognitive and social goals.

It uses music to encourage, comfort and empower, providing opportunities for meaningful connection, creative expression, and joyful shared experiences.

“Within a hospital like GOSH, there is such a vast array of patients served, that the goals for each session are hugely different and individually tailored,” says Katya.

“The only common goal - in almost every session - is to have fun. Being in the hospital can be an enormously traumatic and stressful event for a child, teen, parent, or extended family system – anything that can spark a smile, a laugh, or a moment of connection, can be an incredibly meaningful and needed event for the patient and their family.

“While creating a fun, interactive musical connection might be the initial goal, it’s just the first stepping stone in a much larger process. From there, I work to incorporate any goals that are communicated from the MDT (Play, Speech and Language, Physio, and Occupational Therapy, Psychology, Social Work, and of course the medical team). Goals can include anything from a patient developing their coping skills, working on fine or gross motor skills through music, or increasing a patient’s ability to express themselves emotionally.

“Children in the hospital have a lot that’s done to them. Music is something that can be done with them and by them.”

Katya says her favourite part of the job is watching a young person find their voice through music or seeing them discover a new way for that voice to be heard.

You should start to see Katya around the hospital in the coming weeks. Her main instrument is the harp, but you’ll most likely see her in the hospital carting around her guitar, keyboard, ukuleles, and an unfathomable number of percussion instruments.

This project is being delivered in collaboration with Chiltern Music Therapy and has been generously funded by The Peterson Family Foundation.

New hope to prevent blindness in children with rare genetic disease

A new treatment that could prevent blindness in children with the CLN2 type Batten disease has been trialled by Clinicians at GOSH and University College London Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (UCL GOS ICH).

GOSH only hospital outside of North America to receive innovation funding award for AI

GOSH has been awarded the Amazon Web Services IMAGINE Grant: Children’s Health Innovation Award, to support artificial intelligence (AI) development and drive progress for children’s healthcare.

New clinical trial at GOSH gives hope to children with aggressive blood cancer

Researchers at GOSH and UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (UCL GOS ICH) are collaborating on a novel approach to clinical trials to give hope to children with an aggressive type of blood cancer, T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T-ALL)

GOSH wins funding for technology to support research to improve children’s health outcomes

GOSH has been successful in obtaining funding of £1.46m from the National Institute for Health and Care Research’s (NIHR) Capital Investment Bid.