Facility Dog Program
Custom Programs, Turn Key Convenience, Decades of Experiences
Why does my facility need a therapy dog?
Making a Difference
There is a long history of dogs helping people throughout mankind's history. While today's needs may vary from those of centuries past, dogs are still here to help us navigate and thrive in today's world.
Therapy dogs aid those in need by providing task oriented help, constructive confidence building, an increase in physical and mental health, and much more. Please see our Resources section for more information on this connection and how it is utilized in professional settings.
What types of facilities do you place dogs in?
Doing What’s Needed
Our dogs are placed in locations involving health, stress relief, and learning needs with the goal of building confidence to increase performance and well being of those within the facility. These include schools, homes, hospitals, police departments, and much more.
Our Healing Pause team has decades of experience in many professional environments and will custom design a program for your facility within the framework of your regulations, protocols, and needs.
How does it work?
Building A Team
The first step is to contact our administrative team with your interest. This can be done in the planning phase or any step of the approval process within your organization. We start by offering our assistance to your facility's team to discuss why a facility dog will benefit your situation and how the Healing Pause program works. Then we outline the basic tasks, dog training and care needs, and structure that would be necessary to include a facility dog in your situation. Next, you obtain approval from your facility and their team with our guidance as needed.
With final approval, we select a dog within our training facility and work to train it for your specific facility while maintaining communications to aid in administrative needs throughout the process. When the training is complete, we then participate in a turn over session at your facility where the dog is officially turned over to the facility after staff and handler training, media/team interactions, and other needs as requested.
After this initial turn over, Healing Pause will remain in contact for periodic check ins to evaluate progress and address further questions as the partnership grows.
What are the financial needs?
We Are Here For You
To produce a dog that is suitable for a therapy situation, it requires a significant amount of training, certification, and care. Because of this, our typical pricing range for a facility therapy dog is between $15,000-20,000 depending on the complexity of the training and necessary experience prior to the dog joining your facility.
Our experienced team will give you advice on funding, financing, and fundraising as needed. Occasionally we donate a dog to a facility depending on the availability of fundraising and social media/marketing opportunities currently in place. These donated dogs are financed through the support of our donations acquired through our general donation fund.
Healing Pause also aids in the obtaining of local sponsors to defray the continuing costs of supplies, grooming, and veterinary care as part of our turn key program so you can focus on taking care of your facility.
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Our dogs are typically ready to become a facility dog within 6 months of your initial contact with our team.
What kind of dogs do you use in your program?
Consistency and Reliability
The dogs utilized in our program are normally purpose bred dogs for tasks that are conducive to helping people in order to provide the consistency our training team needs in order to produce dogs reliably. Most of our dogs are Labrador Retrievers because of these reasons. For those facilities that have different needs or goals, we also work with Australian Shepherds, Border Collies, German Shepherd Dogs, Papillons, and Water Dogs primarily.
Our prospective dogs are all health tested with the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals in accordance with their breed requirements, selected from lines that are known for correct structure, temperament, health, and performance. We maintain strict health and veterinary care guidelines with our partner veterinarians.
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Ages for our facility dogs range from 2 to 7 years old typically as this assures the dog has plenty of experiences and training to integrate as a therapy dog with ease. Your facility dog will come with many titling certificates to reflect it's obedience, temperament, and task suitability in accordance with a third party organization's guidelines to avoid program bias.