Understanding how technology could better support children's palliative care for families, children and clinicians
Project background:
The Global Treehouse is a charity whose vision is that every child, regardless of their health condition, receives the palliative care support they need to live life to the fullest. Our mission is to catalyse change, scale investments, and build a supportive community to advance Children’s palliative care (CPC) globally.
Project aims:
Inclusively supported Global Treehouse to carry out research with clinicians and families around the world to understand how technology is currently being used across the CPC journey and where technology could help to best meet the needs of clinicians, families and children in the future.
Global Treehouse wanted to explore the role of technology in children’s palliative care and understand where it is already helping families and providers, where gaps remain, and where digital tools could strengthen compassionate care. Global Treehouse also wanted to explore how they might spark and scale improvements to CPC through technology, including launching something like an innovation competition or hackathon.
Children’s palliative care is deeply human and relational, and precisely because of this, thoughtful digital innovation has the potential to amplify, not replace, the support families and clinicians value most.
Project approach
First of all we carried out desk research to understand what currently exists in terms of technology being used across CPC.
Next we conducted research with families, children’s palliative care providers, technologists and innovators to better understand existing and emerging technologies in CPC and the unmet user needs and challenges when it comes to using technology and AI in CPC.
We approached technology in the broadest sense - assistive technology, medical devices, telehealth, AI, patient note taking systems, virtual reality etc.
Research:
We reached out to Global Treehouse’s network of CPC providers around the world and asked who might be interested in having a research conversation with us about how they currently use technology across the CPC journey and where they think technology might be able to further help them and the children and families they support.
We used a high-level journey map of the key stages of children’s palliative care to help guide these conversations.
Outcomes and impact:
There were a few main outcomes and deliverables from this project, one of the main outcomes was a report that pulled together the insights from speaking with clinicians, families and technologists. We also created a Children's palliative care journey map. All of these learnings are now being shared across the Global Treehouse network.
“This research gave us a much clearer understanding of where technology could genuinely add value in children’s palliative care - grounded in the experiences of families and clinicians. It has directly shaped Global Treehouse’s approach to digital innovation: using technology to amplify, not replace, compassionate care, and connecting technologists with real unmet needs.”
- Laura Dale-Harris, Executive director at Global Treehouse
Thank you:
Thank you to all the people who took part in the project, we really appreciate your time and for sharing your experiences with us
Thank you to the Global Treehouse team for being brilliant to work with!
Team:
Charley Pothecary, Inclusively
Global Treehouse team