Hiya. So a team of us including @NaseemAhmadpour have produced this thing on design of VR and the like for distraction during procedures for kids. jmir.org/2020/7/e19752/ I pinch myself that I get to work with Naseem and others on this.
Anyway. I am now going to get back to a thread on this. I had the chance to do a bunch of interviews for this. About 65 kids of all ages. 35 parents/carers.
And Naseem and crew did a combination of interviews and sessions of co-design and role play with kids. Particularly those who are intensely phobic of vaccinations.
Plus we did interviews with staff. And parents of kids with needle phobias. And we learned heaps.
For starters, the key things for design of distraction techniques were essentially agreed upon by all those groups.
Here they are. 
And there were other key things we learnt. For example, the kids with a vaccination phobia absolutely didn’t want distraction experiences that tried to make them chill straight away.
They said ‘I am super stressed when I start. My heart is racing. Give me something exciting. Then slow things down if you like. I can’t relax straight away.’
And in those 65 kids’ interviews about coming for surgery I expected a bunch of kids to be worried about waking up during the surgery. But heaps of kids were worried they’d never wake up.
I changed my whole preop spiel from this. Instead of just focusing on being ‘more than just a little sleep’ I now also talk about how they already have the power to make sure they don’t sleep too long....
.... because once I turn things off they already have everything they need to get rid of the sleepy drugs.
Anyway it is particularly excellent to have this work out. Partly because:
- COVID-19 has very much stopped our progress (for now).
- Attracting support for this work has proven a little difficult.
- COVID-19 has very much stopped our progress (for now).
- Attracting support for this work has proven a little difficult.
We did, however manage to find funds to pay for open access. So anyone can read it.
What next? Trial things designed with these ideas embedded when kids have actual procedures. *Waves to ethics committee*
Side note: when advised by a punter from a big North American kids hospital that we should just ‘get on with the next step’ I had to explain that where they have support staff of about 1 per 10 docs, we have 1 of these folks. For 60 staff.
And we share them with another department.
Respect to those who deal with that and have research as their primary thing in Oz.
Oh and another thing. I did interviews in kids down to the age of 4. Kids of all ages discussed concepts of awareness, control of their bodies, worrying if their parents would be ok, sleep, and waking or not.
We underestimate kids.
We underestimate kids.
