I’ve said for a long time that Facility Dogs are the Rodney Dangerfield of the Canine Companions for Independence world, and, in my experience, even most associated with CCI aren’t really aware of the wide variety of things they do.

I know I sure didn’t give them the respect they deserve initially, and that was largely because every time I heard them being brought up, it was as a means to an end, specifically in military hospitals, of educating patients about applying for service dogs. Now that’s certainly a great thing and very much a part of what they do, but they have a tremendous role to play all on their own, and there aren’t nearly enough of them out there.

That’s why I was so happy to see this great recent video with CCI Facility Dog Scully and his partner Elizabeth Penny – they are perhaps the best example I’ve seen of using the full range of a Facility Dog’s capabilities in a physical rehabilitation environment. Video is only 7 1/2 minutes, but if you don’t even have that much time, fast forward to 2:25 where Elizabeth explains and demonstrates what Scully does, and give me 5 minutes.

The video speaks for itself and says more than I ever could, but note the big things Elizabeth talks about having Scully help with:

• articulation of speech – e.g., after strokes, aphasia, or brain injuries with the associated difficulty speaking
• physical therapy – grooming, walking, feeding, teaching commands
• education – patients who might benefit from a service dog get hands-on training and actually work with him
• pure motivation – especially with pediatric patients, just to get them up and outta the bed (“Sometimes patients will say ‘I’ll come down for Scully, but I’m not coming down for therapy.’”)

You can see a whole list of rehabilitation goals Scully helps with at his WakeMed page:

• Improve memory
• Improve word retrieval
• Improve sequencing skills
• Improve socialization
• Increase auditory comprehension
• Increase verbal spontaneous speech
• Increase motivation for participation
• Increase attention
• Improve use of upper extremities
• Improve ability to interact with dog
• Improve use of gestures in language
• Improve articulation
• Improve sitting balance
• Improve gait training
• Decrease situational depression

(By the way, Scully, as you some of you may have wondered about, was named for Vin Scully, the legendary Dodgers broadcaster. Very cool story about how that happened – I don’t know that Vin himself even knows there is a dog named after him.)

There are several CCI Facility Dogs involved in military settings, most notably Tommy at the Naval Medical Center San Diego Comprehensive Combat Casualty Care Center (C5); and Ascot and Bhadra at the Oklahoma City VA Medical Center. Based on numerous conversations I’ve had over the years, though, I’m firmly convinced that the vast majority of occupational therapists have no idea what a Facility Dog can do, and if they did, they’d be pounding on CCI’s door to get one.

Elizabeth said it best: “I don’t know if I could go without having a dog in rehab. The impact that it has made on my patients, and my coworkers… I just don’t know that I could go without one.”