Telling the world about tube-fed children

We’re creating a public awareness campaign to improve the lives of tube-fed children

The SUCCEED Study Group is a unique Australian collaboration between families, clinicians and researchers all passionate about bringing the joy back to mealtimes for tube-fed children.

We have been working together since 2017 and we are proud to have created childfeeding.org, the first ever Tube Feeding Picnic, to have been on Channel 7 news and many other achievements.

Time and time again we have heard from parents and carers how hard it is to educate your family, friends, community and even health professionals about what tube feeding is and isn’t, and how they can help to make your lives better.

In response to what we’ve been told, we want to do new things that will make a positive difference to families like yours.

The SUCCEED Study Group have teamed up with the Design Innovation Research Centre (DIRC) at the University of Technology Sydney to help create a public awareness campaign around child tube feeding.

To make it everything it should be, we need input from parents, families, and friends of tube-fed children to help us decide what to do, and what it would mean to do it well.

We are inviting people to join us from home in an online workshop to come up with ideas for a public campaign to support tube-feeding kids and their families. The workshop will be in two parts – an hour to brainstorm ideas, and then two hours a week or so later to work together on particular ideas. We would check in with you in advance and make joining online easy.

We want to come up with ideas for educating and enabling people in ways that honour and respect the experience of tube-feeding families. We want to figure out what the key messages should be, who the target audience should be, so that friends, relatives and the general public can engage positively with joyful, thriving children, rather than seeing a tube and being uncomfortable or uncertain.

The workshop will be relaxed and informal and led by an experienced facilitator from the Design Innovation Research Centre (DIRC) at the University of Technology Sydney, in partnership with SuCCEED.

We will try to schedule the time so it works best for you, and we totally understand you might need to dip in and out for childcare or other reasons. We have space for about five families total now, making it a cosy but safe space, and giving everyone plenty of chance to share their ideas and inputs. There will be the chance for more people to give their ideas too, if they would like.

We are starting small so that we can really listen to each person and spend time understanding your ideas.

If you would like to participate, we would ALSO like to invite a relative or close friend of yours to participate as well. We think if this is about conversations with others, we should have them there too. You’re welcome though to decide whether to join us by yourself, or with someone else you’d be comfortable being there.

After the workshop the SUCCEED team will pitch the strongest ideas to philanthropists to gain funding to actually turn the idea into a reality – so there’s a real intention to make whatever it is families tell us would be best, happen!

What: Two online workshops with up to 5 other families, about 1-2 hours each (max)
When: August and September 2020
Why: To help us create a public awareness campaign to improve the lives of tube-fed children and their families.

If have got this far and even think you MIGHT be interested, please email us and we will get in touch. There is no obligation to continue even if you reach out now – we’d just love to hear from you.