Making hospitals less frightening for children

For a sick child, a hospital is often a place of fear. Philips and Disney set out to design an experience that would ease that fear and anxiety, bringing together Disney's storytelling with Philips' technology and clinical expertise.

Anxiety affects more than how a child feels. Anxious patients find instructions harder to follow and move during scans, which lengthens exams and disrupts the whole hospital workflow.

As Experience Lead, I directed the conceptualisation of the experience. Because the concept was co-created, I designed the workshops, facilitated the discussions, collected and refined the concepts, and helped both companies evaluate them.

Along the way I coordinated a core team of four and more than twenty collaborators across both organisations, holding the vision through a complex landscape of stakeholders.

• Mapped the end-to-end hospital journey and found four moments where anxiety shapes a child's experience most.
• Framed the brief: how children could use idle time in hospital to build emotional resilience before and after a procedure.
• Defined four key experience themes and mapped them across the high-level end-to-end hospital journey, to identify how best to shape the experience at the most relevant touchpoints.
• Designed a three-day immersive programme for Disney and Philips creatives, clinicians and technical experts: observations at Disneyland Paris, a visit to Philips' Hospital Lab, then a co-creation workshop to define various end-to-end experience concepts.
• Built a scoring method that weighed each concept's value for children against its value for both businesses, so that the choice of the final experience concept would not be biased.
• Defined the key assumptions and handed the concept over to the implementation research team, who went on to pilot it in hospitals.

At the heart of the chosen concept is a Disney-themed hospital buddy that accompanies each child through the moments that frighten them most: all the moments when they are waiting for something but don't know what's next, or they do, and they don't look forward to it.

To cope with the anxiety that builds during idle time, the child follows one continuous story throughout the key touchpoints in the hospital, with a companion at their side.

Both companies chose the concept, which moved into development with Philips Ambient Experience, Philips Design and Disney's creative and CSR teams. It was tested in a multi-centre clinical study across six European hospitals.

The experience is now rolling out to hospitals with eligible Philips MRI installations across Central, Eastern and Western Europe, as part of a global expansion across 87 countries.