Optimising Children’s Experiences of Receiving Care

Parents & carers have long been used as proxies for giving feedback about paediatric healthcare. Valuable as this is, the views of children themselves are also vital. Find out how CHA members are working to make this possible.

Global safety & quality experts recognise that key to improving health outcomes for patients is to seek and respond to feedback from patients and their caregivers about their experiences of receiving care.   

CHA members use a variety of approaches to listening to and learning from children & young people in an effort to improve their services.  In our Child and Family Centred Care Network Group there are some excellent case studies that have been shared in recent times available in our member’s community (you must be logged into your account to access these resources).    

There are some unique challenges when it comes to seeking feedback from children, as some children can have limited ability to provide feedback due to their young age, literacy, developmental issues, sense of cultural safety or illness.  For these reasons parents and carers are often asked to provide feedback on behalf of their child.  While this is valuable, it is also important that children themselves can teach us “what matters to me”.   

While there are some validated tools available globally to help collect information from families and children about their experiences of paediatric healthcare, most are not freely available.  Many rely upon parents & carers as a proxy for their child.   

Paediatric Patient Reported Experience Measures Project

For these reasons, CHA has embarked upon a project designed to help children’s services to ask children & young people what matters to them as a key strategy to learning more about how to improve their experiences of receiving care.  

CHA is pleased to be partnering with Children’s Hospitals and the Starlight Children’s Foundation  to develop a freely available National Paediatric Patient Reported Experience Measures (pPREMS) specific to children and young people. 

 Once developed and validated, the measures will be freely available to help paediatric service learn about what children think of & value when they need hospital care.   

To find out more about our Benchmarking Program

To find out more about our Benchmarking Program

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