Great idea: Rights-based standards as a comic strip! Starting this month, children who have to undergo a medical procedure can see what they are entitled to through accessible comic strips. The drawings were created with the help of children from various countries, including members of the national Children’s Advisory Council of EACH Member Stichting Kind & Zorg.
How children undergo a medical procedure, such as having blood taken or an IV put in, is also a matter of joint decision-making. Children have the right to information they can understand, to ask questions and to be given enough time to realise what is going to happen. This is different for every child, but the rights are the same.
Rights-based standards
These rights are formulated in the Rights-based standards, developed by the international iSUPPORT group led by Lucy Bray of Edge Hill University in the United Kingdom. The group strives for medical procedures for children without fear, pain, stress and trauma. The Rights-based standards form an international guideline for this, based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The comic strip is the children’s version of these guidelines. The drawings were created with the help of more than 100 children from countries including the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Children from the national Children’s Advisory Council of Kind & Zorg in the Netherlands also took part. The children themselves chose comic strips as the format for the children’s version.
The simpler, the better
Project manager Jorien Mulder – van ’t Riet from Kind & Zorg is working closely with Lucy Bray to develop the children’s version. ‘The first concept contained faces with a lot of detail, showing different emotions,’ says Jorien. ‘The children found this confusing and too distracting. For them, the simpler the better. They also wanted to see the child itself more centrally than was the case in those first concepts.’
‘The children also indicated that it was very important to them that every child could recognise themselves in the drawings. As far as they were concerned, gender and ethnicity could be omitted. The same applied to legs, because a child in a wheelchair should also be able to recognise themselves in the drawings, they said. In short, after that first version, the children simply sent us back to the drawing board.’
Pride
Jorien Mulder van ’t Riet looks back on the process with a good feeling. ‘Together, we have created something we can be proud of. It was rewarding work to develop a child-friendly version of the Rights-based standards with the children themselves, which they can easily understand. With the drawings, we not only increase the reach of the guideline, but also help children to better understand and stand up for their rights in a medical setting.’
To the Rights-based standards and the comic strip
Astrid van Walsem, journalist