Teen Chronic Pain Book

Client
The Walton Centre Pain Management Team

Challenge
To create a book to help a young person aged 14-18 (and beyond) living with chronic pain, transition from children’s services to adult services.

Solution
apt. were really pleased to partner with the Studio school in Liverpool for this job. After receiving the brief, we knew we needed to consult young people within the age range that the book covers, to see what they were influenced by and what they would engage with. We held two workshops in the school, working with groups of year 8 (12-13) and year 12 (16-17) young people to get some different perspectives.

During the first workshops we put up lots of visual ideas around fashion, gaming and “youth branding” and asked for their thoughts, giving them a few exercises to do to help us narrow down styles, tone of voice, fonts and colours they preferred. In the second workshops we presented the findings to the same groups of young people in graphic styles and asked for their feedback. We also asked them to vote on their preferred style. Lucky for us, there was a clear style favourite and some very pertinent points raised.

From these valuable sessions we were able to begin to develop the style of the book and working with the Walton Team, rewrite the content to be much more a much more relatable tone. This was then sent to the Pain Management Team at The Walton Centre to look at and shared with the Pain team at Alder Hey Hospital for comments. During this time, the Pain Management Team also showed the draft book to a small group of patients who had recently transitioned and they were able to give further feedback on what they felt they were missing from the text.

The final product was made into a printed book and a PDF for online use. To ensure all patients were covered, Walton also received a fully accessible version for screen readers.

The Walton Centre Pain Team hope they will be able to share this book for use across other NHS organisations.  You can download a version from the Walton Centre Pain Management page here. 

Kerry Matthews, Clinical Psychologist and Walton Pain Team Project Lead said
“It has been a pleasure to work with Sarah, Rachael and their team on this project.  From the start, they showed such interest and enthusiasm for this project and dedicated a lot of time to understanding the context and scope of what we were trying to achieve and produce.  They have been so helpful throughout, always being available to guide and advise on the layout and design of this booklet; and together we have put together something that we are proud of and excited to begin using within our Pain Transition Services.”