I am working with a team from Sydney Children’s Hospital Network to improve care and support for parents of children with complex feeding difficulties. The project is called SuCCEED (Supporting Children with Complex Feeding Difficulties). Maridulu Budyari Gumal have provided $50,000 to get us started.  R+AMP will enable a step-change in our impact and strengthen our ability to initiate a second, bigger cycle of research.

One in 3 Australian children has feeding difficulties of some kind. For many, these difficulties are serious, or even life-threatening. Where children cannot feed orally, they need to use a plastic tube to survive and thrive.

Our project addresses significant gaps in support for parents. Parents go home from hospital with a set of pdfs focusing on technical and medical information. Totally missing is support on how to get on with everyday life when you have a tube-fed child. This is what parents have been telling us matters most to them. We have spoken to parents and built a pilot website – childfeeding.org – full of information ranging from practical tips, real stories of tube-feeding from start to finish, and coping strategies (featured on Channel 7 News).

We want to drive public interest in our study, lead the conversation about feeding difficulties in childhood, and create a strong message to secure future funding. This is a highly emotional communication space. The message and the way of delivering it need to be appropriately attuned to this. 

We need R+AMP funding to appoint an external provider who will help us:

• Position the website within a global market, to ensure we reach the intended audience, provide unique, relevant content, and engage as many people as possible
• Enabling us to refine our content so that we deliver its emotional content in the most effective way.
• Develop a narrative and vocabulary so we can shape the way the conversation around complex feeding difficulties happens.
• Construct a clear mission and brand narrative to better communicate the vision, uniqueness and potential of SuCCEED to make our public media as effective as possible, and enable us to better pitch for additional funding.

$2,000 will cover the basic costs, and our extension target of $3,500 will set us up most strongly for success.