Choose Your Own Adventure! Co-Designing and Sharing Information with Children in Healthcare
This project is about the co-creation of an online welcome tour for new clients of a paediatric hospital, Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. You’ll notice that in this exhibit:
- Health literate and child-friendly language is used in the tour itself
- This exhibit is interactive, to mirror a potential iteration or simulation of the final product
- There are many voices represented in the exhibit’s videos such as staff, families and clients – but the client voice is not centred – yet. We want this research project to heavily involve kids as co-designers of their own healthcare information, as our main goal is for children’s voices to be centred and represented. Many paediatric healthcare resources are geared toward parents or caregivers, and we want children to feel just as knowledgeable about their own health and bodies. We acknowledge that this exhibit is one possible prototype of the project, and that the project can look quite different by the end of this research – especially with the leadership and inclusion of children at Holland Bloorview.
That being said, we hope you enjoy yourself in choosing your own adventure at our hospital! Below, you can click the following link to get started, or you can read more about the researcher.
About the researcher:
Melissa Ngo is a Family Support Specialist at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital and co-founder of Hand Over Hand Community Organization. She strives to co-design engaging, accessible, health literate resources for families. Her research project is about co-creating a virtual welcome tour at a kids rehabilitation hospital, and a choose-your-own-adventure theme was suggested by families of the hospital. Through this research, she hopes to reflect that children are valuable and strong co-designers of their own healthcare information. Melissa’s work and overall project has to do with health equity, co-creation, and community and educational program development.
Contact information:
- Twitter: @melissango
- Holland Bloorview’s Website: www.hollandbloorview.ca
- Nonprofit Website: www.handoverhand.ca