Rosalina and Yoda are full-time Children’s Center employees, complete with Johns Hopkins ID badges that they wear pinned to their official-looking blue and white vests.

The highly trained facility dogs work 40 hours a week alongside their child life specialist handlers, bringing guidance and support to young patients and families, and cheer to their human co-workers.

The dogs arrived in Baltimore for training on Feb. 2 and quickly established themselves as local celebrities who can barely walk down a Children’s Center corridor without multiple stops for pets, snuggles, tail-wags and kisses.

“These dogs are such an amazing addition,” says Meghan Shackelford, a pediatric nurse practitioner, bending down one morning to greet them by name and soak up some doggie love. “They’re an immediate magnet for happiness.”

Rosalina brightens the day of a young patient, Jameson

Yoda and Rosalina (known as Rosie) are already making an enormous difference in caring for children.

They provide quiet support during infusions, demonstrate what it’s like to wear a blood pressure cuff, participate in activities like reading or painting, and encourage mobility by batting around a balloon.

Hospital beds are less lonely when one of the dogs arrives, gently resting paws across a patient’s legs, licking a hand and laying a furry head on a young shoulder.

“It’s been amazing,” says Carrie Potter, the child life specialist paired with Yoda, a 2-year-old Labrador-golden retriever mix. “Kids respond so well to them. Whatever the goal is — taking medications, working to build rapport — it seems like the barriers fall away when Yoda is involved.”

One patient, she says, was nervous about getting out of bed after a procedure, but he forgot his fears when Potter attached a second leash to Yoda so the patient could walk him. Yoda also greeted him in the waiting room and laid down next to him during tests. And each time the child took his medication, Yoda would hold out a paw to shake his hand.

One of Rosie’s first patient visits was with a 2-year-old who was understandably unhappy about being in the hospital. “His face lit up when we walked in, and he started talking about his dog at home,” says Molly Trippe-Gallagher, the child life specialist paired with Rosie, a 2-year-old Lab-golden retriever mix. “When kids look back and think about being here, they’re going to look back and remember Rosie.”

Trippe-Gallagher says she understands the bond between children and dogs from her own experience. “I remember as a kid I would talk and cuddle with my dog and even read to her before I wanted to do that with an adult,” she says. “These facility dogs are so well trained to be able to bring that out in a child.”

‘Sit’ and ‘Stay’ Are Just the Start

Yoda and Rosie are different than the therapy dogs who sometimes visit Johns Hopkins adult and pediatric patients for a couple of hours at a time. That long-standing program welcomes selected family pets for scheduled visits, provided they have been registered by a pet therapy organization.

Facility dogs, by contrast, are bred to be calm and friendly, and are trained for work in a specific field, such as health care or education. They live with their handlers, who have gone through their own rigorous selection process and education.

For Yoda and Rosie, “sit” and “stay” are just the beginning. They know more than 40 commands and are particularly attuned to the demands of working in a pediatric hospital. When they hear “visit,” for example, they rest their head on someone’s lap; “breathe” means to put their snout in an anesthesia mask. They can push elevator buttons, and even know to be mindful of tubes and lines when visiting a child in intensive care.

Yoda and Rosie spent their early months learning socialization skills with volunteer puppy raisers, and then were trained for about seven months at the New York campus of Canine Companions, a national nonprofit that provides service and facility dogs.

Before they could be handlers, Potter and Trippe-Gallagher were interviewed over the phone and in person, and traveled to the Long Island site to show off their dog-handling abilities. Then Kimberly Doyle, a Canine Companions senior instructor, brought the dogs to Baltimore, giving on-site training to the handlers and their new four-legged colleagues.

Doyle matched Yoda with Potter and Rosie with Trippe-Gallagher. She stayed in Baltimore a week, helping the canines and humans get used to each other as they learned to navigate the corridors, elevators and rooms of the Children’s Center.

Potter and Trippe-Gallagher both had family dogs already, and promised that their pets would be rehomed if they didn’t get along with the facility dogs. Fortunately, all the dogs and humans in both families blended without drama. When the vests come off, Yoda and Rosie shed their serious sides and morph from facility dogs to playful family pets.

Facility Dogs in Florida

It has taken about four years of discussion and planning to make the Hopkins Paws for Healing Facility Dog Program at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center a reality.

“I’ve been advocating for it for a long time and doing a lot of background research along with Patrice Brylske, director of Child Life Services,” says Potter, noting that the work included raising donor funds and collaborating with Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, which launched its facility dog program with the arrival of Brea, a Labrador, in 2021. Boomer, a Lab-golden retriever mix, joined in 2025.

Leah Frohnerath, the child life specialist who handles Brea at All Children’s, says she’s happy to see Baltimore adopt a similar program.

The benefits of being around dogs are well-documented, Frohnerath says. “We know that dogs can reduce our anxiety, drop our blood pressure, lower our heart rate, and increase oxytocin and serotonin levels in our blood, which are happy hormones that we need in order to be resilient.”

Every day is different, she says. “This morning, we walked with a child who has sickle cell disease who really needs to exercise and get the blood flowing through her legs to help with the crisis that she’s experiencing. Later, we might go to the intensive care unit and be at the bedside of a teenager who was injured in a car accident and needs a little pick-me-up.”

Brea and Boomer and Rosie and Yoda also boost the mood of the staff at both hospitals.

“We knew the dogs were going to be helpful with the patients, but we were surprised at how much the staff loves them and sees them as this breath of fresh air when they’re walking through the halls,” Frohnerath says. “That has been such a gift.”