Help Teach Ted improve kids’ medical experiences

Each year, millions of children will face challenging medical experiences. For their families, finding resources to help effectively prepare and support the child can be difficult. For service providers, treating anxious kids can lead to increases in cost, time and staffing requirements.

At Teach Ted we want to change this but we need your help

This year we are partnering with the Behavioural Sciences Unit at UNSW and Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick to test the efficacy of our app prototype. The app helps reduce anxiety for children needing blood tests and ultrasounds by letting them travel virtually through the experience, learning who they’ll meet and what might happen.

Parent Tips and Discussion Points empower carers to more effectively support their child and also feel in control themselves, meaning the whole family can face these challenges with confidence rather than fear.  

“Teach Ted has enormous potential to make a positive impact on the lives of sick children and their families, not only during their hospital visit but in the long-term. We hope that this research project will contribute to evidence-based resources to help clinicians support families undergoing procedures.”

CHRISTINA SIGNORELLI PhD  l Post-doctoral Research Fellow Behavioural Sciences Unit, University of New South Wales

How you can help

We have received a $15,000 TechVoucher grant from NSW Department of Innovation and need to raise a further $17,000 to get this important research off the ground. 

Your donation supports the researchers and experts we’re engaging to develop and deliver this project. Teach Ted is self-funding our time and we have received pro-bono support from a developer to build the prototype. 

Sharing our campaign with your family, friends and colleagues also makes a huge difference! The more people who know about this important work, the quicker we can drive change. 

Why we need to change the status quo

Many parents are unaware of what might happen or how best to explain it to their child so they need easy to access, factually based tools and resources to support them. This is where we come in.

At Teach Ted we leverage the research-based tools and techniques used by Child Life Therapists in children’s hospitals and us the power of storytelling and technology to create easy-to-use apps and storybooks that are available to families across the world, regardless of where they live or who is undertaking their care. By turning learning into a game, children are engaged and learn more effectively, parents are empowered to prepare their child before they get to treatment and providers are able to gain efficiencies.

Best of all, the experience for everyone involved is improved dramatically!

About Teach Ted co-founders: Sare Christensen and Sarah Cummings

We know this problem first-hand. We met when our daughters were born and have spent our fair share of time in hospitals and undergoing major and minor medical tests and treatments. With a background in design and illustration, Sare created a book to help her son understand her daughter’s heart surgery. Sarah was running playgroup events and teaching parents about everyday learning through play on behalf of Playgroup NSW. 

We struggled to find tools that would help us prepare our kids for medical experiences so we decided to create our own. We are leveraging our professional skills in design, product management, marketing and projects. To ensure our solutions really work, we’re partnering with experts like the researchers at UNSW and Child Life Therapists in the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network.  

Our approach is for profit, for purpose meaning that the more successful we are, the more we are able to give more back to the community, through research, education and free resources for families in need. 

About the rewards

Our awards have been road-tested with families in real life, so we know they work! We are offering a range of rewards with something to suit every budget. We really appreciate any donation you are able to make and work hard to make every dollar count.

You can read more details about the individual products included our rewards on our website and if you have any questions or would like to discuss a bespoke reward option please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

About our partners

We are working with Not-for-profit organisations, hospitals and community support groups.