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.

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 what feels stressful, overwhelming, or supportive during these times, 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?

Trauma-informed care means that everyone involved in caring for a child and their family — doctors, nurses, and other staff — understands that being in the hospital can be scary, stressful, or even bring up memories of past difficult experiences.

This approach goes beyond treating physical injuries. It focuses on helping children and families feel safe, supporting them emotionally, empowering them in their experiences, and making sure their wellbeing is cared for alongside their physical recovery.

Our trauma-informed care research looks at what kids and families experience in hospital, so that we can find practical ways to support wellbeing and recovery. Our work is guided by six key principles of trauma-informed care:

Safety
Trustworthiness and transparency
Peer support
Collaboration
Empowerment and choice
Cultural respect and humility

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

How you can get involved

Our Exploring Hospital Experiences team are seeking expressions of interest for participants to be involved in their study. They are looking for:

Parents/caregivers who have at least one child between 0-17 years old, and that child has attended a WA hospital within the past three years as a patient
Adolescents aged between 12-17 years old, who have been a patient of a WA hospital within the past 12 months.

If this sounds like you, please click the link here to express your interest 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 advisory groups

Our trauma-informed care research is supported by and designed with our three advisory groups:

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.

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

Supporting Families Accessing Hospital Care

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

Aim: This project is about understanding what children and families go through 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 and arts-based 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