Kinderwebsite wins the gold medal at JBZ

Today was the annual Quality and Safety Day at Jeroen Bosch Ziekenhuis in the Netherlands, and it was a marvelous opportunity for the staff and public to learn of initiatives taken by people in the hospital.  I was asked to be on the jury judging from among the top entries in the day's friendly competition.  Our six-member body quickly reached a consensus on the winner, the Kinderwebsite, or children's web site.

Please go and try it out here.  You come to a home page welcoming you to the hospital (see portion above), with noise of a playground in the background, and you are asked to click on or touch your age. (As you go over each button, it says the age aloud to help you.)  Click on age 9, for example.

When you get to the next screen, the background noise changes to that of a hospital, and you find the area you are interested in.  Let's say you have an operation coming up.  You click on operatie, and a series of short videos show up.  An age-appropriate child is featured, and each video accurately depicts what you will experience as you show up for pre-op, the operation, and post-op.  In video number one, you see the identification band being put on, the child walking down the corridor (still being permitted to hold her favorite stuffed animal), and her blood pressure being taken.  There is no sugar-coating of what will happen and what it will look like.  The idea is to present an accurate representation that can help a child and his/her family prepare for what otherwise would be a scary environment and uncertain set of procedures.

Activity on the site during its first few months, from April 1 to October 1, was 4,624 visitors, of whom 65% were new viewers and 35% were returning.  The average residence time for each viewer was 5 minutes and seven seconds, impressive for any website.

Our jury was asked to rank projects on the basis of patient-centeredness, the various dimensions of patient care, the value to the patient (and family), the sustainability of the project, and its creativity.  Kinderwebsite was the clear favorite, although all of the projects were very good.

Two of the brains on the team behind this website were Yvonne Pulles and Matthys Timmerman, and they were very excited when the announcement came that they had won the top prize.