Recreation for Workers and in Hospitals: Benefits and Considerations
Recreation for Workers
The Importance of Employee Well-being
If in the past, fun and leisure were considered threats to worker productivity by entrepreneurs, today, leading corporations promote various social benefits aimed at increasing the productivity of their top officials. These benefits include trips, gap years, gym memberships, sports clubs, and classes.
Many companies, including IBM, DuPont, Xerox, and Sugar Loaf, invest in the quality of life of their employees. They offer fitness centers, gyms, recreation areas, health plans, dietary menus, ergonomics, flexible schedules, and massage therapy.
The goal of these companies is to attract and retain the best employees by keeping them motivated and loyal. Their motto is: “A happy employee is more productive than an unhappy one.” Sometimes, however, strategies to make work attractive can lead to executives suffering from “Sunday neurosis,” or the fear of free time, resulting from anxiety about excelling at work.
Recreation for Production Line Workers
For workers on the production line, in addition to compensatory exercises, there are several leisure options offered within their companies or by professional entertainers. These recreational clubs were created to add playfulness to labor, “humanizing the work environment, improving employee satisfaction and integration, and thereby restoring desired yields.”
Benefits of Recreation Programs
Recreation programs offer numerous benefits beyond employee well-being. For example, “the family respects the company more, and the worker has the opportunity to be proud of what they do.” Moreover, “recreation balances differences; directors, managers, and workers play soccer on the same team, and none of them has hierarchical superiority at that time.”
Concerns about Company-Controlled Leisure
Some leisure researchers raise concerns about these company-provided “benefits.” They argue that the company ends up controlling the employee even during their “free” time. The employee’s leisure is restricted to what’s offered within the company’s package rather than being something they choose independently.
With this type of functionalist leisure, the company not only establishes a good corporate image but also directs employee interests toward company-approved leisure activities. Thus, leisure “will continue to be seen as a favor, a gift offered by ‘good’ companies, as an attenuator of class conflict rather than as a social right.”
The Need for Employee Involvement in Leisure Planning
We believe that recreational programs for employees can create situations of passivity with the alienated consumption of free time. It is crucial to involve workers in the production and control of leisure policies instead of accepting imposed programs that lack employee input.
Leisure professionals must be aware of the slow and gradual limitations imposed on employees when working conditions are unsuitable for human nature. In this sense, company leisure programs must strive to do more than simply entertain workers during their free time.
Recreation in Hospitals
“If an adult is weakened when e’internado at a hospital in children this effect is strengthened
Cristina Capobianco, coordinator of the sector for the Humanization of Pediatrics Department, UNIFESP.
Usually, we associate the hospital to play Clowndoctors. The mission of the Doctors of Joy is to be an organization dedicated to bringing joy to hospitalized children, their parents and health professionals, through the art of Clown Theatre, nurturing this form of expression as meio.de enrich the human experience.
The thought system of down (clown) interferes with the reality of the hospital. The diagnosis becomes unimportant in its scale of values, because not every diagnosis reflects the actual state of the person. Sick as a child is, there exists an essence that wants to play. And this is very important because “if the ICU is no place to clown also certainly not a place for children.”
To be a doctor of joy you must be a degree in Performing Arts and be part of the team. The name Clowndoctors and the like is registered with the INPI, the National Institute of Industrial Property, which bans the use of such third parties.
However, the play activity in hospitals is not an exclusivity of the “Doctors of Joy.” A well-trained professional can fit into this environment by developing other projects. Some hospitals have, library, playroom (The “living library” brings books to the hospital and the possibility of being read to children who wish to hear the stories, the play already has a recreation that makes the games)
It is im-port nt remember the beneficial effect of body movement for the sick person, but remember that physical activities do not solve themselves.
The restrictions medical procedures to boost recreational social interaction magnified, fun and personal growth of the bearer of disease are not very different from those for other groups.
When the patient is being recreated in the hospital environment and special rules, some steps are important. Toys and clothes used by the entertainer should be sterilized ap0 $ each activity, it is necessary to avoid contamination from hospital. The toy handled by a child must be treated before being used by another as a way to avoid transmission of any contagious emfermidade.
Another interesting tip, coming from the work of the “doctors of joy,” parody is the day to day hospital. The animator must invent games and scenarios based on what happens in the hospital: injections … of joy, transplants … of narizyermel /) 0, rides in a wheelchair. The actors generally meet at par, due to a childwill identify more with the figure and others with feminine.
Doctors of Joy is a nonprofit organization that has sponsored | and supporting organizations and private donations and membership fees for taxpayers. Pioneers in Brazil, the mission of the Doctors of Joy is possible to hospitalized children and adolescents, their families and professionals healthcare joy amid the tension of the hospital. Using humor as an essential resource, artists, highly skilled professionals in the areas of theatrical clown and circus techniques, medically trained specifically to perform with the utmost care and efficiency, their work with young hospital patients, helping them to overcome trauma inerentes’aos cases of illness and hospitalization, restoring joy as part of their lives.