One Year Later: Reflecting on “Wendy’s Welcome”

Featured on Boston Society of Architects (BSA), PAYETTE Associate Principal Stuart Baur shares his experience working on our “You Are Here: Wendy’s Welcome to the ED” video project. Developed for MGH for Children (MGHfC), the video explains what pediatric patients can expect during an emergency room visit and gives children insight into their healthcare experience in hopes of alleviating their stress.

It’s been just over a year since we delivered “You Are Here: Wendy’s Welcome to the ED” to the pediatric emergency department at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children (MGHfC), and a lot has happened since then. In April we presented the project at A’17 AIA Conference on Architecture with Hilary D’Amato, one of the Child Life specialists at MGHfC. September saw us speaking with Darcy Daniels (Wendy’s mother) at the Healthcare Facilities Symposium and Expo in Austin, followed by a final presentation in November at the Healthcare Design Expo and Conference in Orlando. In each case, the opportunity to speak publicly about the project has been an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve learned from our work on “Wendy’s Welcome.”

By all appearances, the video is working. Though we don’t have targeted research to measure its effectiveness, anecdotes abound of patients being taken to their exam room already knowing what to expect. Whether it’s asking to see the cool lights on the ceiling, recognizing the Child Life Specialist when she walks into the room or understanding that waiting will be part of their experience, people are clearly watching the video and absorbing its message. We’ve heard direct feedback like “the most helpful part was telling me about all the people I will meet and that I might have to wait a long time.” More can still be done to make the video accessible to a larger percentage of the hospital population (like developing a Spanish language version), but it’s clear that making such investments would be effort well spent.

Having a champion for the project on the hospital staff was an absolutely vital component of what it took to make this project happen. It would have been impossible not to recognize the importance of Darcy and Wendy’s tenacity in bringing this project to life, but when we first got involved it was easy to miss how important Sandy Clancy was. We had the opportunity to interview Sandy in anticipation of our presentation at the Healthcare Design Conference, and in that discussion she commented on how few people within the hospital originally understood the project or saw its value. That she did, and that she had the strength of her convictions to keep pushing for what she knew to be a great idea, even without a clear path to success, is an unsung but vitally important part of the “Wendy’s Welcome” story.

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