Welcome - Calm Down Methods

Have a question about Calm Down Methods? Had some experience with using it that you could share and that might help others? Found a particularly effective way of adapting it to your hospital? Please post it here in this section of the forum.

After our ward recieved funding through GMW Dragons' Den we were able to purchase all we needed for the calm boxes. We used the list that was on here but also added a few bits of our own after suggestions from the service users through the community meetings. Our champion has put these together and is going to keep speaking to the service users to see what else they would like to see in there and what else would be helpful. I guess at first we did have to do a bit of shopping around for products that were safe to use as things like glass is contraband. Also many of our services users enjoy sewing and find this calming and therapeutic and so we had a long team discussion about how to manage this if we put a sewing kit in the calm boxes. Our champion found children's blunt needles; see the link below:
www.jjneedles.com/products/Plastic-Needl...52d-Bright-Pink.html
The boxes on Keats Ward GMW Meadowbrook contain;
Stress balls
Blankets x 3
Soft toys
MP3 player with relaxing music and guided meditation
Calming book and guided meditation information
Ear plugs
Puzzle Books/Colouring/drawing books
Sewing kit / cross stitch
Light Box
Lavender and assorted moisturiser cream
Assortment of bath products
LED Candles
Face Masks
Plasticine
Sachets of hot chocolate/Horlicks.

At last, our Chill Out box Mark 2 is up and running. Champions John Roughley and Nicky Gladwysh have worked hard at assembling all the items for this, and items are still being sourced and added as they find things that might help someone.
So far, it contains ...
Light projector
LED Candles
4 fleecy blankets
mood pillow
lavender oil and carrier oil
3 mp3 players of various kinds - all donated - range of music and meditations on these
inexpensive headphones for above!
tangle toy
stressballs
reading glasses
letter writing stuff and stamps
motivational little books
gel ice eye mask
head massager - now that IS weird, but they tell me it's very relaxing!
and more!

The Chill Out box from Keats ward. Well, three Chillout boxes really. Nyreen and Becky are going to post the sorts of things they have in them, as it has changed since they first started. They mentioned that they now take suggestions from patients as to what should be available, and that sometimes patients bring things back for the box after being out on leave. They also warned against having too much available (even though they had three boxes!). Perhaps they can explain what they mean?