Visual narratives of the pediatric illness experience: children communicating with clinicians through video.

The pediatric illness experience is a complex subject that requires a multidimensional, flexible, and patient-centered approach. The video intervention/prevention assessment (VIA) method, with its diverse source data and multidisciplinary analytical frameworks, generates findings that can be examined from any number of perspectives simply by asking different questions. As an exploration of human experience, VIA can be applied to various medical and psychiatric conditions. It has been used to investigate the experiences of children and adolescents who live with asthma, obesity, spina bifida, and diabetes mellitus. VIA currently is being applied to a longitudinal examination of the transition to adulthood by pediatric patients with spina bifida, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, and HIV.