Ochsner Children's Kids' Council to Shape Patient Experience

What happened

Ochsner Children's, the paediatric arm of Louisiana-based Ochsner Health, has launched a Kids' Council designed to give young patients a direct voice in shaping the hospital's care and service experience. The initiative brings children into the design process itself, rather than relying solely on parents, clinicians or adult advisory boards to represent their needs.

According to Ochsner Health, the council is intended to gather first-hand input from paediatric patients on what matters to them during hospital visits and treatment, feeding that feedback into decisions about how care is delivered and experienced.

Why it matters

Healthcare providers have long relied on parents, guardians and clinical staff to interpret what young patients want or need — often filtering out the child's own perspective in the process. By formalising a channel for children to weigh in directly, Ochsner Children's is treating young patients as legitimate stakeholders in service design, not just recipients of care decided elsewhere.

For experience leaders across sectors, this signals a broader shift: co-design is moving into demographics traditionally excluded from feedback loops. Paediatric care is a particularly high-stakes environment, where fear, unfamiliarity and loss of control shape a child's experience as much as clinical outcomes do — making direct input from patients themselves a meaningful design input rather than a symbolic gesture.

The Renascence take

Most organisations equate "voice of the customer" with whoever is easiest to survey — usually the adult in the room. This move quietly challenges that assumption by treating a historically silent stakeholder group as a genuine source of design intelligence.

The real test of a council like this isn't whether it exists, but whether its input actually changes operational decisions — waiting-room design, how procedures are explained, how fear is managed in the moment. Symbolic listening is easy; structural listening is rare. Any organisation serving a population it doesn't fully understand — children, patients, first-time users — should ask the same question Ochsner appears to be asking here: who holds the most relevant experience data, and are we actually built to hear from them, or just from the people who speak for them?