Dr Kim Chilman-Blair Medikidz Interview

Dr Kim Chilman-Blair Medikidz Interview

As doctors working in paediatrics, Dr Kim Chilman-Blair and Dr Kate Hersov became increasingly frustrated that there was very little information available to help educate sick children about disease. With most medical information targeted at adults, they saw an opportunity to develop an entirely new approach to conveying complex information on diseases and illnesses to children.
Their solution: a series of comic-book superheroes called the Medikidz.

Who are the Medikidz?
Every year in the top seven English-speaking countries, some 350 million 5-15-year-olds are diagnosed with a childhood illness. Designed to meet this challenge, the Medikidz (Pump, Chi, Skinderella, Gastronomic, Axon and Abacus) are a group of five larger-than-life cartoon superheroes who live on Mediland - a planet shaped just like the human body. Through the comic books and website the Medikidz take you on a journey through Mediland, explaining complex medical issues in an entertaining, exciting and novel way to young people - and their parents.

What began as an idea for comic books has matured into the world's first multimedia health education company for children. At present there are 19 titles, including books on asthma, diabetes, epilepsy, HIV and leukaemia, and a website that offers medical information and facilitates social networking - a 'medical Facebook' for sick kids. There are also healthy doses of blogging and Twitter to deliver medical information to teenagers.

Dr Kim Chilman-Blair, author and Chief Executive of Medikidz says, 'We founded Medikidz after working in paediatrics and discovering that there was no patient information being made available specifically for young patients. So we set out to produce comic books (explaining conditions like Type 1 Diabetes, Leukaemia, Asthma, Osteosarcoma, Food Allergy, Obesity, Scoliosis, OSA and Epilepsy) and information brochures (educating on specific medicines or investigations, like 'Medikidz Explain MRI Scans') all for young patients aged 8-15 years. All of our titles are written by doctors, then peer reviewed by leading consultants in the field, and are then reviewed by our Youth Advisory Board. By offering this information to the child at the point of diagnosis, we can put the child at ease as well as empowering them with knowledge.'

In May 2010 HarperCollinsPublishers published the following 10 Medikidz titles:
Medikidz explain epilepsy
Medikidz explain food allergy
Medikidz explain type 1 diabetes
Medikidz explain breast cancer
Medikidz explain scoliosis
Medikidz explain leukaemia
Medikidz explain childhood overweight
Medikidz explain asthma
Medikidz explain HIV
Medikidz explain Swine Flu
More titles will follow in June and September 2010.


Testimonials
"I have been waiting for something like this all my career. Medikidz will change the lives of young patients worldwide ... Medikidz will assist every paediatrician, clinic and hospital in educating children and families about their illness AND save the doctor's time in doing so!'"- Dr Jay Gordon, Leading US paediatrician, Los Angeles
"This [What's up with Richard? Medikidz explain leukaemia] is a must. I spend half my life trying to explain leukaemia to children and parents. But this is the language they want to see. We need a lot more of it and I'm sure we'll see it." - Dr Paul Veys, Great Ormond Street Hospital's head of the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit.

"There is an enormous need to provide appropriate information about disease processes to children in a form they understand. Having this in comic-book format and using social networking technology will be an enormous step forward. It moves the focus away from parents to children. The psychology of the relationship between parents and children can complicate things, because parents will naturally protect their children and may not pass on information to them. But in fact that child can gain much more from properly understanding where they are and what's happening to them." -Professor Ricky Richardson, UK paediatrician and government adviser, London

For more information visit www.medikidz.com

Medikidz
Harper Collins Publishers
Authors: Dr Kim Chilman-Blair and Dr Kate Hersov
Price: $14.99

Interview with Dr Kim Chilman-Blair

Can you tell us a little bit about the MediKidz series of books?

Dr Kim Chilman-Blair: My background is in medicine. I am a pediatric doctor. I realised as going through medical school that there is no information to give children to explain all the different diagnoses. First of all I met a girl called Wendy who had epilepsy and her and her mother were asking me about where they could get information about the kind of epilepsy she had and I couldn't find anything. So I was really shocked and started searching around on the internet to find something I could give to this girl and it came up with absolutely nothing. I looked around about different conditions and I realised that up until now that around the world there is nothing written by doctors for kids to describe all the different conditions that they have.

In collaboration with some graphic novelists we have come up with a series of comic books, written by doctors for kids. In conjunction with some writers from the US who write for children of this age group that know what they like, they make the jokes funny and accessible to them, they add in the sarcasm. They are very, very clever. We sort of have a love hate relationship, where I say this is the medical thing and they say well this is how to make it funny. We have struck a really good balance.


Why did you decide to put them in a comic form?

Dr Kim Chilman-Blair: We decided to do that because graphic novels are accessible to a lot of kids. Boys tend to like them more than girls but then girls will tolerate comic books and can enjoy them as well. Whereas boys won't read something that is a picture book and all girly. The other thing about comics is that they travel up into adulthood. Some of these concepts, we get parents calling in and saying, for the first time I understand my daughters condition because I've read the comic book on it.


So, they are helpful for children and parents?

Dr Kim Chilman-Blair: Definitely. I think that they are just as much read by children as parents. The medical terms are in there and we are explaining them. We take the difficult to understand concepts and are breaking them down so that people can understand what it actually means when their doctor uses all these hard words


Does each cartoon character have their own role in the comic books?

Dr Kim Chilman-Blair: Yes absolutely. Axon is the brain specialist so he covers everything in the brain - neurology and the psychiatry as well. Then there is Chi who does all the respiratory conditions. Skinderella she is the skin and bones - so she does dermatology and orthopedics. Gastronomic he is gastro/intestinal system, so he does the gut. And then Pump is the heart so he does all the blood disorders as well.

Just depending on what the basis of that condition is. For ADHD, Axon for the brain, takes the child around into the brain. They go into a planet called MediLand where they live, it's in outer space. It's a huge planet shaped as a human body so they go off into the brain for the book on ADHD. For the book on leukemia they go into the bone marrow. For the book on scoliosis they go to the spine. They can travel around the body with a click of their finger and go down to a cell level or go back to an organ level. And just see how the body normally works, and how it works specifically if you're suffering from that condition.


How do you choose what conditions you dedicate a book to and is there many more topics you want to write about?

Dr Kim Chilman-Blair: There are so many we want to write on. We have made a list of 300 topics we want to be able to cover; we have covered the first 20. The one we are working on at the moment is organ transplant. It's for children who have or are going to have an organ transplant. And we are also doing growth hormone deficiency. We've got a list of 300 we want to cover. We are doing one or two a month. It's determined by the demand. We get people writing in, can you please cover this, can you please cover that, can you do dialysis. There is so much information out there that children want explained to them in their own language.


Do you find the books are quite good for friends and siblings that don't understand the illness?

Dr Kim Chilman-Blair: Yes, absolutely. We hear back from teachers that are using them in the classroom. There was one teacher who had a child that had a brain tumor and when he went off to hospital the other children were struggling to understand what was going on. So he used the books in the classroom to explain what a brain tumor is and the treatment and all that sort of thing.