Helping children speak up in the health service

This paper reports the main findings of a study undertaken to investigate children's perceptions of health-care professionals, the environment in which they are cared for and their information needs when sick. The main focus of the investigation was 6-10-year-old chronically sick children (predominantly with cancer). A group of healthy school children were used as a comparison in order to highlight similarities and differences. The draw and write technique and an open-ended stimulus task were presented to a total of 99 children (50 hospital, 49 community). Trent NHS Executive and the South Bank University funded the project through Action for Sick Children (formerly NAWCH). The purpose of this paper is to describe how children appear to view care environments including comments on the sorts of information they want and from whom this might be obtained. A wealth of valuable qualitative data, in the form of pictures and comments were collected and are discussed here alongside a selection of the pictures. The researchers also make certain recommendations for the care of sick children, which were drawn directly from their pictures, responses and comments. A previous paper evaluated the draw and write technique and open-ended stimulus task as a tool for gaining information from a child's perspective and as a possible aid to the construction of audit tools (Bradding & Horstman 1999). A full report of this study, published by South Bank University, is available from the authors. This detailed report includes an extended range of drawings, which can be used for teaching and discussion purposes.