Can an interactive application be used to collect meaningful feedback from paediatric patients and their parents in a hospital setting?

Abstract

The objective of this study was to determine the acceptability of using an interactive application (Fabio the Frog) to understand the experiences and perspectives of children and parents/carers regarding their health care encounter for the purpose of quality improvement and consumer feedback. Children's perspectives of their healthcare were collected via the interactive application through the use of a validated survey, the Children's Perceptions of Healthcare Survey (CPHS). The acceptability of eliciting views from children and parents via an interactive application platform was collected using an additional survey designed for this purpose. Data were collected in two phases. Overall, healthcare experiences were found to be positive across key areas including communication, care delivery, hospital environment, and interaction with staff. The application was identified as easy and fun to use from the perspective of children (n=96) and parents/carers (n=79). Parents/carers also responded positively to the ease and enjoyment they observed when their child was using this tool. Staff appreciated that eliciting children's responses to their care helps to inform high quality care. The interactive application-Fabio the Frog-was a successful strategy for understanding children's experience across a range of ages, abilities and medical conditions. The study demonstrated the acceptability of an application as an engaging and valuable means to collect meaningful feedback from children and their families. Nevertheless, limitations were noted in the practicality of providing an application to patients in a busy clinical environment. Additionally, the authors recognise that a greater challenge lies in finding ways to incorporate feedback into improving the patient experience

Listening to the Voice of the Hospitalized Child: Comparing Children’s Experiences to Their Parents

“…However, the emerging literature on interactive learning programs suggests that the questionnaire would be easier for children to answer if the questions and overall structure reflected the child’s stage of development [ 5 , 13 , 16 ]. From these insights, a survey was created to test whether pediatric patients report perceiving the quality of their hospital experiences differently from their parents by capturing both the child patient’s and the parent or guardian’s feedback using an interactive learning game based on the pediatric patient’s proximal zone of development [ 17 , 18 , 19 ]. This paper will report the results of an interactive Qualtrics survey to test the differences in perceived hospital experience between the child patient and their parent.…”

“…The authors found evidence suggesting that most studies used questionnaires with language too advanced for small children to understand quickly and efficiently [ 16 ]. Emerging studies suggest that interactive learning programs can help engage child patients in health literacy by lowering language barriers and connecting the question domains to the child patients’ proximal zone of development [ 17 , 18 , 19 ]. Using tools that engage pediatric patients at their level of development can enhance the quality of their hospital feedback by reducing barriers to survey engagement related to age.…”

“…Using tools that engage pediatric patients at their level of development can enhance the quality of their hospital feedback by reducing barriers to survey engagement related to age. For example, one study used an interactive application—Fabio the Frog (FtF)—to better understand children’s experiences across various ages, abilities, and medical conditions [ 19 ]. The authors found that a questionnaire design which uses fun animations to make answering survey questions more appealing to children had nearly the same high internal consistency as a survey of their parents.…”

Benchmarking experience to improve paediatric healthcare: listening to the voices of families from two European Children’s University Hospitals

“…This increased focus on PREMs is not evenly spread, with some populations or clinical areas not typically included in PREMs collection [ 9 ]. One such area is paediatric care, which, despite internationally agreed statements on the rights of children to be consulted and involved in decision making, and agreement by health services researchers of the need to include children’s views, remain an underrepresented group [ 10 , 11 ]. There are several possible reasons for this: a residual view that children are not sufficiently developed to be able to meaningfully contribute [ 12 ]; comparatively little evidence on the best mechanisms for collecting paediatric experience data [ 10 ]; and, perceived and real challenges in enabling children to adequately describe their experiences to adults collecting such data.…”

“…One such area is paediatric care, which, despite internationally agreed statements on the rights of children to be consulted and involved in decision making, and agreement by health services researchers of the need to include children’s views, remain an underrepresented group [ 10 , 11 ]. There are several possible reasons for this: a residual view that children are not sufficiently developed to be able to meaningfully contribute [ 12 ]; comparatively little evidence on the best mechanisms for collecting paediatric experience data [ 10 ]; and, perceived and real challenges in enabling children to adequately describe their experiences to adults collecting such data. However, studies have shown that even young children have the capacity to understand their condition and care [ 13 ], and children’s comments are coherent and pertinent to hospitalization experiences [ 11 , 14 ].…”