Congrats for poster winners Kim Boltjes and Emily Tang

Poster competitions awarded at Healthy Start | Ambition Day

During our community event ‘Healthy Start | Ambition Day‘, at Schiecentrale March 9, we have been actively addressing societal challenges through interdisciplinary collaboration. Together with scientists from the social, technical and medical sciences, youth workers, policy officers and social partners, we joined forces to celebrate our ambitions and collaborations for a better future for young people. The program was filled with work sessions, keynote speakers, poster competitions, artistic breaks and the launch of the Healthy Start-ers Fund.

Poster awards were won by Emily Tang and Kim Boltjes for their innovative work, presented by Healthy Start | Young Board chair Michelle Achterberg. Congratulations to both!

Best Poster Societal Impact: Power to the Patient

The project by Kim Boltjes (MSc DfI/Medisign graduation project faculty IDE, TU Delft) is titled ‘Power to the Patient: A Co-Created Design Towards Emotionally-Safe Pediatric Hospitalization’ and aims to contribute to an emotionally-safe, i.e. comfortable and trauma-free hospitalization experience for children, by fostering resilience and empowering children during their short (3-7 days) stay in the hospital.

Kim explains to us what her research entails; ‘Hospitalization can be emotionally threatening and traumatizing for children. In my research, I realized that children face multiple challenges, both related to the medical procedures they have to undergo and the unfamiliar setting they are in. They find themselves in an environment and routine that is completely different from their normal day-to-day lives, missing peer-interactions and playful experiences. A positive emotional state helps children manage stress and anxiety, and fosters resilience to cope with the challenges. Therefore, I designed ‘Hideaway’, a narrative interactive game play intervention, integrating peer-contact, social play, connection with familiar environments and friends, and child-friendly coping tips.’

The title ‘Power to the Patient’ not only refers to (the effect of) the final design, but also reflects the participatory design approach of the project. Observations, conversations and co-design with children and professionals within hospitals and beyond have contributed to understanding the context and current experiences, ultimately coming up with a design that responds to the needs and desires of children.

The project was carried out in collaboration with Stichting Hospital Hero and in-context research took place within the Willem-Alexander Kinderziekenhuis (LUMC) and Juliana Kinderziekenhuis (Haga Ziekenhuis).

Read the full thesis via this link.

Poster: Power to the Patient

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Best Poster Scientific Impact: Family-Centered Practice and Family Outcomes in Residential Youth Care

‘In 2020 I started my PhD research into family-oriented working in residential youth care. Roughly speaking, this means involving parents in helping young people. When I started it was actually my plan to do an overview study into the effectiveness of family-oriented working on families, but I soon came across that practitioners and researchers interpret and therefore also implement family-oriented working in different ways. This makes it difficult to compare the results.’ explains Emily Tang.

‘In my current literature study, I therefore first looked at how family-oriented working was described and implemented in the interventions that were examined in the studies and how the researchers measured family-oriented working. We saw 5 elements of family-oriented working reflected in these intervention descriptions and (coincidentally) also 5 ways in which family-oriented working was measured. We then looked at what effects were measured in families that received family-oriented treatment and what elements this treatment contained, but we cannot actually draw a firm conclusion because there are too few studies for this.’

Would you like to read more about the poster? Emily Tang recently posted information about the poster and the results on this LinkedIn post.

Poster: Family-Centered Practice and Family Outcomes in Residential Youth Care

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