Heal Dog Heal, a program at Norton Health Care and Norton Children's is changing the hospital experience.

The program uses highly trained facility dogs to provide comfort and support to patients and their families.

And today's look at medical news.

We went to Norton Children's Hospital to learn more about these furry employees and how they're improving patient care.

I always had a love personally for animals and just their healing power.

When people are anxious or stressed and I noticed that children's hospitals were adding full time dogs to their their hospital teams and so just went to our administrative team and asked them how they felt about us looking more into starting a program like that.

We have 11 working full time dogs in our hospitals.

Six of them are in pediatric areas and five of them are in our adult areas.

They work about 30 to 40 hours a week and the dogs are paired with a handler and visit our patients and families and staff every day.

I cannot wait to.

Luna is one of our facility dogs that we have two handlers, me and Taryn.

We've been working a full time about that, The Novak Center and at the Children's Hospital.

Our goal is to make the hospital less scary and normalize the experiences that they're going through.

And Luna is just an extension of that so we can help make this big experiences more manageable and in child friendly ways, whether that be to bring cheer and have a little bit of excitement by Luna showing how she can spin around and do some fun tricks, or if that's to sit in a patient's bed and be cuddling.

The dogs are able to reduce anxiety and stress, blood pressure.

We're able to get our kiddos to be a little more compliant with things, you know, after surgery.

If we need to get them up and walking, they can walk the dog.

That's a lot more fun.

If we have a kiddo who might not want to put on their hospital gown, we can dress the dog up in a hospital gown if they're getting an I.V.

or a blood draw or something that might be kind of scary or stressful.

We can do some medical play utilizing our facility dogs.

Luna's done IV starts.

She helps out with patients for procedural support and also with medicine taking.

Sometimes kids don't like to try take their medicine, and it's a little scary, especially when they're at the hospital.

But Luna helps reduce that fear by taking her oral medicine first, taking some water and drinking that through a syringe.

So the kids know that Elena did this.

I can do this, too.

We want to add just some fun to the hospital experience and especially our patients that have to come back frequently.

We want them to not be so scared and not dread coming back, but get excited to come back like, Oh, I'm going to get to see my dog.

Totally.

And yellow dress.

A lot of people say it makes it a little bit easier to come to the clinic or come to the hospital knowing that they will have a chance to see Luna.

No matter where she is.

She's brightening people's days.

Just even a minute or two with a dog can make such a difference.

I would have asked to have this program here a long time ago if I knew just the positive response and all the support that we've gotten.

Each of the dogs have a very unique personality and they and their handler done such an amazing job.

I'm really proud of the entire team.

Just another reason why dogs are human's best friend Heather Storr says that all of their facility dogs were trained by PAWS with Purpose.

It's a Louisville based organization that partners with the Kentucky Women's Correctional Institution to train service dogs.