Three founding practices. A book personalised to your team and the condition you see most, at cost, in exchange for running the measurement with me.
Most patient-education material is generic, text-heavy and written for adults. This is the opposite: a picture book built around one condition you see constantly, featuring your team, your clinic and your care pathway, written so a child can follow it and a parent can read it aloud.
Founding practices get that book at cost. In return, we run a short measurement alongside it — because the point is not that a storybook feels nice. The point is whether it changes anything you can see in your own numbers.
If your governance process requires review, I work through it with you. No patient-identifiable data is collected at any point.
Agreed in writing before the pilot starts and not changed afterwards. Two come straight out of your existing systems, three take under a minute of someone's time.
| Measure | Where it comes from | Why this one |
|---|---|---|
| Calls and portal messages per patient, 30 days | Your system | Objective, already logged, and a real cost line for the practice |
| Follow-up attendance / no-show rate | Your system | Already tracked, and financially meaningful |
| Parent confidence explaining it to their child | Parent survey | The gap parents describe most often, measured before and after |
| Parent recall — three factual questions on the care plan | Parent survey | Tests the thing the literature says fails hardest |
| Minutes spent re-explaining, per visit | One clinician line | The clearest return on the practice's own time |
| Was the book actually read, and how often | Parent survey | Without this, none of the rest can be interpreted |
of what a clinician says is forgotten by the time the patient leaves — and around half of what is remembered is remembered wrong.
Source ↗of parents leave a paediatric emergency visit without fully understanding the discharge instructions they were given.
Source ↗non-adherence to medication among paediatric caregivers — the gap between instructions given and care actually delivered at home.
Source ↗Why personalise it to your practice rather than write something generic? Because familiarising a child with the actual place and the actual people is what preparation programmes — hospital tours, photo books, play preparation — have always done. Putting your waiting room and your nurse in the story is not decoration. It is the same mechanism, in a form the family can take home and re-read.
One practice and twenty families, without randomisation, gives a directional result — not proof. What we will be able to say afterwards is something like “parents' confidence moved from A to B, and the practice logged C fewer follow-up calls per patient.” I publish the design before we start, report what we find either way, and say plainly that everyone involved knew they were in a pilot.
We agree the condition, the cast of characters and the measures. Your baseline data starts collecting itself while the book is being made.
≈ 4–6 weeksI write and illustrate the book, personalised to your practice. You review the clinical content. It gets read by real children before it goes to print.
≈ 6 weeksCopies go to families. Surveys come back. You get a written report, and your practice is named as a founding partner on it.
≈ 8–12 weeksThe test is not the diagnosis. It is how long the family lives with it — long enough that a book gets read more than once and keeps doing work between appointments.
“How often do parents tell you they don't know what to say?”
“Does the family live with this long enough that a book would be read again?”