Involving a young person in the development of a digital resource in nurse education

Health policies across western societies have embedded the need for service user and carer perspectives in service design and delivery of educational programmes. There is a growing recognition of the need to include the perspectives of children and young people as service users in the design and delivery of child focused educational programmes. Digital storytelling provides a strategy for student nurses to gain insight into the lived experiences of children and young people. Engaging with these stories enables students to develop an understanding of a young persons' experience of healthcare. This paper outlines a project that developed a digital learning object based upon a young person's experience of cancer and student evaluations of the digital learning object as a teaching and learning strategy. Over 80% of students rated the digital learning object as interesting and were motivated to explore its content. In addition, the evaluation highlighted that listening to the young person's experiences of her treatment regimes was informative and assisted understanding of a patients' perspective of care delivery.