My name is Rachel Green, and I am a User Experience Designer at Triteq. In conjunction with a medical student from Oxford University, we are creating a pain mapping exercise sheet for children waiting in A&E. The point of the sheet is to help keep children occupied while they wait as well as encouraging children to take responsibility for their own healthcare. The idea is that the child will identify points of pain on the sheet, then hand it to the doctor or nurse who sees them. This will hopefully also help speed up the triaging process, as the practitioner can see at a glance where the child is in pain.

At the Paediatric Hackathon event hosted by Innovation Forum Oxford, I met Benjamin Walker, a medical student from Balliol College. During the idea generation activity, we were discussing how best to keep children occupied while they were waiting in A&E. As we were jotting things down on Post-It Notes, we had the idea to give children a drawing of the body that they could label or colour in to show where they were hurting. After the event, we decided this idea should be explored. The first version of the pain mapping exercise sheet was drawn up, and shown to other medical students and clinicians for feedback. After some iterations we had our illustrated exercise sheet, complete with Wong-Baker pain scale faces and a sensory homunculus figure that would appeal to children.

Our next step is to trial the current exercise sheet by handing it out to families waiting in A&E in order to get their feedback. Potentially we could expand this activity sheet into a full activity booklet to keep children occupied. At this stage in the process we have spoken to Sally Hitchings, a Play Specialist at the Children’s Emergency Department in the John Radcliffe Hospital, who was very supportive of the project. We are liaising with Louise Rawlinson, Matron of the Emergency Department for OUH in order to get the project formally set up. We are hoping to test out the exercise sheet and get some results soon!