Involving children in planning health care: the Derby experience

Abstract 

This paper describes the approach of the Derbyshire Children's Hospital to gaining children's participation in planning health care. It draws upon a long and successful track record of planning with children, evidenced by their award-winning children's hospital designed in partnership with children and opened in 1996. The service has now gone on to work with children in different ways and on issues large and small which affect them in hospital. Examples are given of successful change which arose in this way.

The author counsels caution about the ways in which children should be involved in healthcare planning and the need to obtain an appropriate range of views from children to consider in conjunction with evidence-based information held by professionals.

User involvement is now central to all healthcare modernization initiatives. It is rightly seen as being the key to making services appropriate and acceptable to their users and, in that way, more effective. For children's services this concept is not new: at least at the microlevel. Paediatric practitioners normally follow a very democratic model of care which involves children and families in designing and delivering their own plans for care. Extending this principle to a larger scale when planning new services may, however, seem a daunting prospect and one which may seem to be outside the experience or competence of the health professional. This article offers the experience of one acute paediatric centre, Derby, in working with children in planning.

Keywords:  Hospital design, Children's participation, Play in healthcare planning