What We Offer
About the Program
The Streetlight team is made up of 60+ University of Florida students (mostly premed and all volunteers) who companion with these hospitalized adolescents/young adults through daily room visits (4 – 6 p.m.), evening teen programming (6:30 -8:30 p.m.), art collages as identity door profiles, room customization, and internet support linking them to teens in their own hospital and beyond.
Streetlight team members help adolescents manage their health condition with more personal control in navigating the transitions ahead – which can include a return to ‘the street,’ a move to adult care, a relapse, or death. Whatever lies ahead, the team is with them through it all. Put simply…They provide the peer companionship that gets lost over a long course of chemo. They befriend the Cystic Fibrosis (CF) youth who can now only do homebound schooling, or the Sickle Cell teen that can’t stay in school enough to maintain friends or grades.
Streetlight Patient Populations
The primary disease populations presenting in our adolescent patients are cancer, Cystic Fibrosis, and Sickle Cell Disease however we do see patients outside of these three groups including lupus, transplants, and various other chronic diseases. They each have their own difficult issues, but what they share in common is fear, alienation and psychosocial disruption – which greatly affects their compliance and in turn their prognosis, as well as their relationship with their community.