Ochsner Children's Kids' Council Puts Young Patients in CX Design

What happened

Ochsner Children's has established a Kids' Council, creating a formal channel for paediatric patients to influence how the hospital designs and delivers care. Rather than routing feedback solely through parents or clinical staff, the initiative brings young patients directly into conversations about their own experience of treatment, facilities and services.

The council is positioned as a mechanism for gathering first-hand input from children on what works and what doesn't during their time in hospital, with that feedback intended to shape decisions across the patient journey — from ward environment to the way care is communicated.

Why it matters

Healthcare has traditionally treated children as passive recipients of care, with experience decisions filtered through adult proxies — parents, guardians or clinicians — who interpret needs on a child's behalf. A structured council that solicits input straight from young patients marks a shift toward designing care around the person actually receiving it, rather than around the assumptions of those around them.

For experience and service-design leaders, this is a useful illustration of a broader principle: proxy feedback is not the same as lived feedback. Adults reporting on behalf of a child inevitably compress, filter or reinterpret what that child actually felt. A dedicated council structure signals that the hospital is treating children's own perceptions as a legitimate, distinct data source for service improvement — not merely a nice-to-have engagement gesture.

The Renascence take

Most coverage of this kind of initiative will frame it as a warm, feel-good patient-engagement story. The more interesting angle is what it exposes about how organisations — in healthcare and well beyond — routinely mis-measure experience by asking the wrong person.

Any service built around a dependent user — a child, a patient under sedation, an elderly relative, even a junior employee reporting up through a manager — risks optimising for the proxy's comfort rather than the actual user's. A children's council only works if it changes real decisions, not just decor; the test of this initiative won't be whether kids are consulted, but whether their input visibly overrides adult assumptions somewhere in the care pathway. Any organisation serving a dependent or intermediated customer should ask the same question: whose voice is actually shaping the experience, and whose is merely being reported?