Welcome to iSupport
Across healthcare, babies, children, and young people undergo thousands of procedures and appointments every day, from blood tests and injections to imaging and consultations. While many encounters are positive, too many children continue to experience unnecessary fear, distress, coercion, restraint, and trauma. These negative moments shape how children engage with healthcare for life, often leading to profound anxiety, healthcare avoidance, and sensory distress.
iSupport aims to provide an evidence-informed framework to help shift the focus from "How do we get this done?" to "How do we help this child have a positive and safe experience?"
Our vision is to see the iSupport principles embedded within practice and policy. We want a child's psychological safety to be viewed with the same seriousness as their physical safety. Children may not remember every clinical detail of their care, but they will always remember how they felt. Together, we can try and make sure those experiences do not leave lasting trauma.
🎧Watch this short video to learn a little bit more about iSupport.
The Story Behind iSupport
iSupport began with a young person named Katie Dixon, who experienced repeated traumatic restraint during medical procedures throughout her childhood. Rather than accepting this as an unavoidable part of healthcare, she challenged professionals with a simple question: "How do we make things better for children having procedures?"
As a result the iSupport rights-based standards were co-developed over a two-year period through extensive international consultation with:
203 children and young people
78 parents and carers
418 multidisciplinary healthcare professionals
Check out our paper published in the European Journal of Pediatrics
“iSupport is very close to my heart and is really important to me. I experienced many badly handled procedures as a child and now as an adult the trauma still affects many of my life choices. I want to prevent other children from experiencing what I did and having difficulties with future procedures. The psychological wellbeing of a child before, during and after a procedure needs to be protected.
Katie, aged 20 years UK, multiple procedures experienced throughout childhood.
What iSupport Provides
iSupport combines standards, resources, and audit and quality improvement approaches to help healthcare professionals and organisations move towards child-centred rights-based practice across all healthcare settings. The freely available resources include:
The right-based standards: Six principles make up the iSupport standards. There are versions of the standards for professionals, parents, and children (including those with additional support needs).
Preparation Tools: Resources like "My Prep Sheet" to help children express their preferences and what helps them when using health services.
iSupport Checklist: To help professionals deliver safe child-centred care.
Audit & QI Tools: Co-developed audit tools and support to help teams evaluate local practice, develop quality improvement plans and measure impact from implementing the iSupport standards.
Find out More
Access the iSupport Checklist here, a practical tool designed to help clinical teams plan procedures safely, compassionately, and in line with a rights-based approach.
Discover the impact we are making, see our awards and read our academic publications
Meet the multidisciplinary international team steering the iSupport collaboration.
Visit our dedicated Audit and Quality Improvement page to access information about how we can support teams to examine their practice against the iSupport principles and develop quality improvement plans.
Get in contact and share your views