Understanding children and families' hospital experiences

Our research focuses on identifying practical ways to provide trauma-informed care for children and families visiting the hospital.

How you can get involved

You are invited to participate in our Exploring Hospital Experiences project that seeks to understand hospital experiences for kids, their families, and hospital staff.

We are looking for:

Parents/caregivers who have a child aged 0-17 years old who has been a patient in a WA hospital within the past three years;
Adolescents aged 12-17 years old, who have been a patient of a WA hospital within the past 12 months;
Hospital staff who currently work at a WA hospital with paediatric patients 0-17 years old and their families.

If you fit into one of these categories, please express your interest via the link below and our researchers will be in touch with further details.

You can also email us at hospital.experiences@thekids.org.au if you have questions or need support to fill out the form.

Our work

The Healing Kids, Healing Families (HKHF) team wants to understand how difficult or stressful experiences affect children and their families, and how we can best support them to heal and move forward.

Our research focuses on listening to and learning from the experiences of children and families visiting the hospital, as well as the staff who care for them. By understanding hospital experiences, we can work with children, families and staff to we can identify practical ways to improve care. One way we do this is through research on trauma-informed care.

What is Trauma-Informed Care?

Doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and other hospital staff realise that each person brings their own experiences, strengths and needs to the hospital environment. For example, the physical, social and emotional experiences can shape how children and families experience healthcare and may influence how they respond to stress, treatment and recovery.

A trauma-informed approach recognises the influence these experiences may have, and considers the whole person, not just their physical health. It focuses on helping children and families feel safe, heard and supported throughout their hospital experience. This approach aims to reduce distress, support emotional wellbeing, and empower children and families to be involved in their care.

Our trauma-informed care research explores what children and families experience during their time in hospital. By listening to their experiences, we aim to identify practical ways to improve care, support wellbeing and promote recovery.

See more about our projects below or email us at hospital.experiences@thekids.org.au.

Our advisory groups

Our three advisory groups help to support and design our research. These advisory groups include:

Youth 12-24yo who have had hospital experiences in the last 5 years
Parents/carers of children 0-18yo who have been to the hospital in the last 5 years
Current WA-based paediatric hospital staff.

Our advisory groups partner with us to design research (including methods and questions), understand and analyse research, share findings and put them into practice/use. We are incredibly grateful for their commitment and the expertise they bring to this research.

Supporting Families Accessing Hospital Care

Lead investigators: Dr Karen Lombardi, Dr Michael English, Amanda Zaffino, Ella Carton

Aim: This project is about understanding the experiences of children and when they are in the hospital and finding new ways to support them. We want to learn from kids, parents/carers, and hospital staff about what helps them feel safe, calm, and cared for.

By listening to the experiences of kids, families, and hospital staff, we will create helpful tools and ideas that make hospital visits more positive and less overwhelming. Our goal is to build a supportive, healing approach that ensures children and families feel understood, safe, and supported during and after their hospital stay.

What we're doing

Learning about the experiences of kids, parents, teens, and hospital staff in receiving and providing trauma-informed care. These learnings will help us develop definitions, guidelines, and frameworks to support hospitals to involve trauma-informed care in their policies, procedures, and practices. This will include developing and testing creative, arts-based approaches to supporting kids’ and families wellbeing in hospital. This research will expand wellbeing and recovery options for children and families through creative mental health approaches and interventions, beyond traditional clinical models of care.

How will we do this

We will interview children, teens, parents/carers, and hospital staff about their hospital experiences. The interviews will be designed with our advisory groups. To make the interviews safe and comfortable for children as young as four, these interviews will use play- and creative-based methods to help kids talk about their hospital experiences. This study will include around 90 participants in total.

Funding: This project receives funding from Embrace at The Kids Research Institute Australia

Developing a Trauma Informed Care Patient-Reported Experience Measure (TIC-PREM)

Lead investigator: Dr Michael English

Aim: More children’s hospitals are becoming interested in using trauma-informed care to create more positive experiences for children and families, but there’s currently no simple way to find out how patients or carers feel about the care they receive. This is important, because the success of trauma-informed care depends on the experiences of the people being cared for.

We plan to create a questionnaire that lets patients and carers share their experiences of care in hospitals and other health environments.

What we're doing

Creating questionnaires that help patients and carers share how hospital care feels to them. Then we will create new versions of these questionnaires specifically for kids, teens, and parents/carers to share their experiences of trauma-informed care in hospitals.

How we will do this

The research team and our Advisory Group will help design the questions to make sure they are clear, meaningful, and useful. Next, an online study with adults will test the first draft before it is trialed with other groups.

Funding: UWA School of Psychological Science

Trauma-Informed Care: Systematic Review

Lead investigators: Dr Hayley Jackson, Dr Tanika Sgherza

Aim: This systematic review will summarise existing research on children’s and families’ experiences of trauma-informed care in paediatric hospital settings.

What we're doing

Reviewing existing research to find out:

Does trauma-informed care improve outcomes for children and caregivers? This includes psychological outcomes like treatment-related distress or trauma symptoms, behavioural outcomes like treatment engagement, clinical outcomes like recovery or use of seclusion/restraint, and patient - or caregiver - reported outcomes like satisfaction with care.
How do children and caregivers experience trauma-informed care? In particular, what feels helpful or safe and what could be improved?

How will we do this?

We will use a structured approach to identify relevant studies, then bring the findings together into a clear summary. The review will give us a better understanding of the existing evidence base, including; how effective trauma-informed care is; how many and what kinds of studies exist (quantitative, qualitative, or both); the types of outcomes and experiences reported; and key gaps in the current research.

Funding: This project receives funding from Embrace at The Kids Research Institute Australia