Developing a medicines management app
Would you like to be involved with developing our new medicines management app? We are looking for child health professionals, and parents/carers who have an interest in testing our mobile app.
We are pleased to announce that the latest phase of development on our new digital tool – designed to help parents and carers to manage their children’s medicines – is now in ready for testing by healthcare professionals and parents/carers and families. Following significant user involvement in the design process, as well as many hours of development and feedback, the app is now ready for user testing before wider release. Read more if you would like to get involved with trialling the app on your mobile phone and sharing your experiences to help to improve the app. We would love to hear from any child health professionals, and parents/carers who have an interest in working with us to test this latest version of the app when it is released at the start of April 2024.
Since the Medicines for Children’s website launched over fifteen ago, we have received many requests for additional support to help parents/carers manage their children’s medicines. Our users, who now number over 3 million, have been asking for a mobile app with users telling us that they would like this app to build on the information provided by the main Medicines for Children website. However, they would like a more personalised service with ways to record their child’s medicines and with additional features that go beyond what the website can provide.
- ‘Phase 1’ of the app development – which resulted in our prototype app – was completed thanks to funding from Comic Relief and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation ‘Tech For Good’ programme.
- This prototype app was developed with input from the three Medicines for Children project partners, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), the Neonatal and Paediatric Pharmacists Group (NPPG), and the children’s charity WellChild, working with Manchester-based social tech agency, Reason Digital.
- WellChild families have worked alongside us at every stage of the process to provide priceless insights into how they manage their routines and medicines at home while caring for children with complex health conditions.
- During the development process over 200 families were consulted and fed into the app – sharing their priorities, their experiences and their views of how an app could help in their daily medicines’ management routine.
- ‘Phase 2’ of the app development – which began in earnest in January 2022 following delays stemming from the pandemic – was again funded externally and has enabled us to add many more features which were requested by families and healthcare professionals after the app prototype was released.
- This latest phase of development on the app started in January 2022.
- Phase 2 focussed on building upon the earlier design of the app, to test the existing features but also to incorporate new features that families felt were missing from earlier versions that would improve the app’s functionality.
- Now in March 2024, the app is set to be released for safety and functionality checks with our close group of healthcare professional stakeholders.
- Following these safety checks the app will be released more widely to a closed group of parents and carers, again for safety check to ensure careful risk management of the new release.
- A series of webinars about the app were held in January 2022.
- These ‘bitesize’ sessions were designed to give child health professionals a quick overview of the app development so far and to share our plans for the next phase.
- Recordings of these sessions are available to view below.
The recordings from the webinar sessions, hosted by Lucy from Reason Digital, have been broken down into smaller sections so you can quickly and easily learn more about the area you are most interested in. Please watch the videos to see what we covered in the sessions and what the plans are for the next phase of the app! (Links to YouTube)
Ideas for additional features to explore
The plans for the next phase of development
Webinars for parents, carers and other interested family members
- A series of webinars for parents and carers were also held in April 2022.
- At these webinars we provided an overview of how the app has been developed so far and its key features.
- We also explored ideas for the next phase of development to see whether they will benefit parents, carers and families.
- Families were asked to share how they currently manage their child’s medicines and explore how the app could support with this in the future.
- In addition to the webinar, the team spoke to families one-to-one, to explore more in depth how families manage shared care with other family members, carers and/or medical professionals.
- If you would like to be involved and input into the app’s testing phase, we would love to hear from you.
- We need to ensure the app is rigorously tested by healthcare professionals to identify any areas of concern before we release the app to families and parents/carers. We would like to hear from professionals from a range of different medical fields from across the UK.
- Following this we would like to hear from families and parents/carers so we can conduct careful testing to make sure that the app will work for them.
- We would like to test that the app will actively help families manage their child’s medicines in the home. We would also like to check the new ‘shared care’ function of the app, to see how the ‘primary carer’, usually mother or father, manages when using the app to link in their child’s ‘secondary carers’ – other people within the child’s network who care for them, such as grandparents, aunts and uncles or siblings. It is also important to see how the shared care feature will be used in reality to improve care between parents who do not live together, or with school nurses, or paid carers.
- Please email medicines.leaflets@rcpch.ac.uk for more information and to find out more about how you can get involved.