Little Journey - Usability Study

Introduction

500,000 children in the UK undergo outpatient surgery annually, with 1 in 10 children having a neurodiversity diagnosis. Children often find visits to hospital scary, however neurodiverse chil-dren are twice as likely to experience anxiety and poorer outcomes. Patient care does not cur-rently focus on preparing children for their hospital attendance, instead focussing on distraction, restraints, and sedatives during their hospital visits.

Little Journey's app intends to psychologically prepare children for their hospital visit, and sub-sequently aims to reduce premedication rates, on-the-day cancellations and pre-operative anxi-ety. If effective, this will bring cost-benefits for the NHS. The app provides virtual tours of the rooms, including surgical theatres, ward areas and playrooms, and age-tailored animations to describe the hospital-specific clinical pathway and procedures. The app also provides relaxation activities and games for children and information articles, fasting guidelines and checklists for their caregivers.

Little Journey are developing an additional module named 'A Little About Me'. This module has several quizzes for children to complete, including questions about how their communication preferences, what's important to them, what they like and how they feel about being in hospi-tal. This is designed to support quicker relationship building between clinical staff and patients and enable support to be provided for neurodiverse children and their parents (or carers). It's important to have real end users provide feedback during the development of this module to support its optimisation for children with ASD.

This study aims to assess the usability of the Little Journey app with 7 children and their parents (or carers) aged between 3-12 years with a diagnosis of ASD and experience of attending hospital for a procedure. Children with an ASD diagnosis will be recruited from Birmingham Children's Hospital's and their responding to recruitment flyers circulated via UHB and BCH staff channels and placed within the vicinity of Birmingham Children's Hospital. Interested and eligible indi-viduals will be invited to participate in a 60-minute session. During the session participants will use the Little Journey app, this will be recorded to film the child and parent's (or carer's) inter-action with the app. The participants will then be asked to provide verbal feedback via a semi-structured interview.