Our member feature this month is on the award-winning Little Journey, who are supporting children and their families before, during and after healthcare interactions, reducing anxiety and improving health outcomes.
Little Journey was founded in 2018 by Dr Chris Evans, an anaesthetic doctor, and Sophie Copley, an expert in human-centred product design. Combining their experiences and expertise, they created Little Journey: a digital eSupport platform designed to prepare, support and inform children and their families throughout healthcare interactions (occurring within both routine care and as part of a clinical research trial).
How does Little Journey work?
Little Journey believes in the power of familiarisation and desensitisation through immersive play to reduce healthcare-induced anxiety, facilitate individual coping strategy development and improve patient experiences and outcomes. The Little Journey platform consists of a family-facing smartphone app and an accompanying web portal accessed by healthcare and research organisations.
Co-created with families, the app delivers engaging, interactive content tailored to the child’s age, procedure type and local hospital. Psychologically preparing and supporting families via virtual tours, hospital guides, relaxation animations, and therapeutic and distraction games, the app has been demonstrated to reduce anxiety and provide significant organisational cost benefits (e.g. through a reduction in on-the-day cancellations). The innovative Little Journey web portal enables organisations to configure app content to their local policies and patient pathways including the uploading of 360-degree images of the actual rooms families will visit for use in the virtual tours.
Little Journey is currently configured to over 50 NHS trusts plus several international hospitals. In 2021 the company was licensed by a global contract research organisation to support children participating in an international paediatric research trial involving multiple procedures and site visits; this resulted in the development of a gamified medication monitor designed to improve adherence to prescribed medication. The platform now supports a variety of procedures (surgery, endoscopy, covid swab testing, phlebotomy) and has been translated into 16 languages.
The Little Journey team is passionate about enabling all children to receive the peri-procedural preparation and support they want and need. Work has commenced on creating new patient pathways (including MRI and ITU) and exploring the potential of using data to further personalise the support provided.
What next for Little Journey?
In April the company announced its collaboration with The LEGO Foundation, having been selected to join the Play for All Accelerator. This will enable enhancement of the product to provide specific support for autistic children and those with ADHD.
Words: Little Journey
To find out more or to connect with Little Journey, head over to their website here.