Funding outcome

A revolution is underway in health - a revolution where patients and health care professionals work together. Essential to achieving this mission in child health and simultaneously improving health outcomes is actively engaging patients and their families in health care decisions. Critical to family involvement in children's healthcare is ensuring that families can have access to essential, often complex health information. Through synergeristic research collaboration amongst the ECHO, ARCHE and TREKK research programs, innovative knowledge tools for parents have been developed. These knowledge tools merged the best available, synthesized health evidence into a user friendly form that harnesses the power of narrative and art to engage lay audiences. Critical to the co-creation of these tools between researchers and parents, is an evaluation of the usability of these tools prior to their widespread implementation. In this summer student project, the student will help with the usability evaluation for 4 innovative information tools for parents with sick children and she will lead a parental evaluation of the usability evaluation process. To maximize generalizability of these findings, the evaluation will occur in three distinctly different health care setting locations in Western Canada (rural Portage La Prairie, Manitoba; remote - North West Territories; and urban - Stollery Children's Hospital). As we continue to develop more knowledge tools for parents, it is essential that we evaluation the usability evaluation phase from the parents' perspective. Ms. Walton's summer student research project will offer important information for how to enhance parent and family engagement in child health research.