Celebrating 15 Years of AboutKidsHealth
AboutKidsHealth (AKH) is celebrating 15 years of providing trusted health and well-ness information from SickKids.
Please join us in marking 15 years of AboutKidsHealth by looking back on AKH’s history and how we have grown to reach over 20 million users around the world each year, with over 3,500 articles, 5,600 illustrations and 100 interactive animations across three websites (AKH, AKH Kids, AKH Teens) and more than a dozen study sites
A Vision for Better Children’s Health
The vision for better children’s health began in 2005 with the How the Body Works website. AboutKidsHealth then built resource centres, now called “learning hubs”, containing plain-language material SickKids clinics can share with patients and their families. AKH was one of the first websites to offer detailed resources for patients and families and continues to update and expand these resource offerings today.
AKH is celebrating 15 years of providing trusted health and well-ness information from SickKids.
On the new website, launched in 2018, resources can now be found in learning hubs and in our Health A-Z and Drug A-Z sections. AKH now has 59 learning hubs and over 3,500 articles, covering hundreds of everyday health topics as well as complex and rare conditions, available in multiple languages.
Multimedia Content
Illustrations have been available on the AKH website, facilitating learning since the very beginning! Over 15 years, our creative team has developed more than 5,500 illustrations and 100 interactive animations. The animations and illustrations show diverse cultures and accommodate labels in 11 languages, including English, French and Chinese. They depict complex heart conditions, simple and complex procedures, signs and symptoms, the anatomy of organs such as the heart and brain, and much more.
The AKH team also creates videos to be used in patient and family learning in clinics at SickKids, as well as to educate general audiences, including children. AboutKidsHealth’s YouTube channel has over 200 videos, with content for parents/caregivers ranging in specificity and complexity from “How to change a diaper” to “How to vent a feeding tube”. Popular videos for children include “Exploring the Heart – The Circulatory System” and “Belly Bonanza – The Digestive System”, with 2.3 million and 22,000 views, respectively, earned over an approximate 6-year period. Our most popular video developed for teens is “Sleep: A bedtime story”, which went viral for a time after its publication two years ago, and currently has 3.4 million views.
Children and Teens Content
AKH also has websites for children and teens. Children can visit AboutKidsHealth for Kids for educational games and videos on topics such as bullying, pain management, diabetes and asthma. AboutKidsHealth for Teens has a library of learning hubs on a variety of health topics, including mental health, cancer and transplant, with articles, interactive animations, illustrations and videos in which they will hear from other teens or learn strategies from health-care professionals to help them along their health-care journey and to support their mental health and well-being.
Social Media Presence
AKH’s Facebook and Twitter channels help us reach engaged users throughout Canada and the United States, with a following of 24,000 across Facebook and Twitter. While the most popular way users enter the AKH website is through Google search, the users who find us through social media tend to be more engaged–users who visit from our Facebook and Twitter pages spend more time on the AKH website than those who enter through Google search.
Sponsors and Contributors
Thank you to our supporters both inside and outside SickKids for helping us reach this milestone. With the help of our sponsors, contributors and reviewers, AboutKidsHealth has become a major source of online health information both within Canada and across the globe, reaching 20 million visitors a year. AKH has had the privilege to work with almost 700 contributors from SickKids over 15 years and to have the strong support of our foundation partners, sponsors and other granting agencies. This support has allowed AKH to continue creating content that is necessary for patient education all over the world, with many projects underway, which will be shared in the coming year.
