Heartsplay’s purpose was also to open a dialogue with the child about congenital heart condition in a fun and engaging way using language the children can understand. Going to hospital can be a terrifying experience for any child and Heartsplay attempted to answer the unspoken questions and familiarise the child with the

• hospitals surroundings and what life is like in hospital,

• the many healthcare providers involved in care provision,

• the instruments used,

• the tests and operations and

• the heart itself and how its works.

The aim was to make the site accessible on the ward through a laptop provided by Heartchildren and for the site to be used by the Play Specialist as an additional learning tool in the playroom on the ward.

The Goals

• To provide important and relevant information in a fun and engaging way to help counteract any anxiety a child may be feeling about their visit to hospital.

• To inform and familiarise prepare the child for the hospital environment and the care they will receive.

• To stimulate the child to ask questions about the hospital, the procedures and tests and their specific congenital disorder.

• To help parents and siblings/extended family to talk about and understand the illness and the upcoming experience in hospital together using a common information source. 

The Approach

Having assembled the working group of multidisciplinary hospital staff headed up by the OLCHC Project Manager and a representative from HeartChildren we drew up the goals and information priorities for the website.

We then established a simple architecture for the site and the most suitable technologies (Macromedia Flash, Ajax etc) to ensure we created a dynamic frontend that was fast and easy to use researching technologies to display maps, flash books, photo galleries, lots of content on one page without clutter and to run a multiple choice quiz at the end.

We then worked on the wireframe and graphic design templates for each page and developed the character of ‘Toby’ who would act as the kids guide around the site.

Simultaneously we began the process of collecting all the relevant information from the multidisciplinary team and ‘translating’ it into language which is easy to read, understand and can be enjoyed by the 8-12 year old age group.

The Solution

The finished result is both elegant in its simplicity and practical in its delivery of information. It has received commendation at the Irish Healthcare Awards and the Crystal Clear Awards and was nominated in two categories for a Golden Spider (Best Education, Research and Training and Best Community and Charity) and won in for Best Community and Charity website.

We achieved all our prelaunch goals:

• We delivered content in a fun and engaging way that was created by the specialist healthcare professionals.

• We used actual patients stories to enable the heart child to directly relate to these experience

• We created simple graphic elements throughout the site to engage the user and simplify the seemingly endless list of;

       a. healthcare professionals
       b. procedures
       c. instruments
       d. hospital areas

Tools / Technology:

HTML, CSS, Flash, Ajax