Globally, there are 162.3 million prevalent cases of children under 15 needing rehabilitation (Cieza et al., 2020), demonstrating the vast need for advancement in this field. When a child faces challenges requiring rehabilitative care, it becomes crucial to prioritise every possible measure to enhance their quality of life and offer the best possible support and resources to navigate through the change in circumstances. The development of a patient centred portal fills a significant gap in the realm of paediatric rehabilitation, addressing this essential part of care for young patients. This project aims to investigate the feasibility of building a Patient Access Portal for paediatric patients undergoing rehabilitation, allowing them to access their treatment plans and progress data in an accessible and engaging manner. This study will involve conducting 1:1 interviews and focus groups with paediatric rehabilitation patients to establish their views on portal features, ensuring that the platform is co-designed with service users from its conception, to guarantee optimal usability and practicality of the portal for the end user. The project will produce early-stage designs to be tested by the patient group before construction. These designs will feature comprehensive care information, developmental resources, and child-oriented gamification elements. This will contribute towards familiarising patients with their care, encouraging developed understanding of their rehabilitation and motivation towards improvement in goals. A prior PPI study in adult rehabilitation patients (Trayner et al., 2023) highlighted the need for comprehensive information through a patient access portal to create clarity surrounding treatment. Participants wanted to be positive partners in their care, but were hindered by insufficient infrastructure, making comments such as _"I don't always know what I'm doing or why"_. The desire for active participation is echoed by paediatric rehabilitative patients such as A, a 14-year-old patient of CNS. with cerebral palsy as a result of an acquired brain injury sustained at birth and likely to require rehabilitation for the rest of his life. A demonstrates the value of providing young people with agency and involvement in managing their treatment, being provided with read-only access Goal Manager, to track and monitor his progress and understand why interventions were happening. He is more engaged and compliant with his treatment regime as a result. Earlier studies involving NHS neurorehabilitation staff (Trayner et al., 2023 \[2\]) also produced favourable views on the patient access portal concept. Participants reacted positively to initial prototypes for clinical use.

Rehabilitation describes a huge range of healthcare activities that take place after a serious injury or illness such as a stroke, traumatic injury, acquired brain injury, combat trauma, cardiac, pulmonary, mental health, or addictions. Globally, an estimated 2.4 billion people are currently living with a health condition that benefits from rehabilitation, and the need for rehabilitation worldwide is predicted to increase due to changes in the health and characteristics of the population. People are living longer, but with more chronic disease and disability. Currently the need for rehabilitation is largely unmet (World Health Organisation, WHO, _Rehabilitation_, November 2021). Goal Manager is a cloud-based application designed to automate core processes in rehabilitation goal setting, facilitating collaborative working for multidisciplinary teams in remote locations, and streamlining gold-standard processes into one system. Goal Manager is a combined workflow management and reporting tool for rehabilitation and it is already helping services all over the UK provide more efficient services to their clients. This project will support the rapid development of the next stage of Goal Manager, a Data Dashboard, which will provide summary information on patient profiles and outcomes in rehabilitation, in order to provide information to guide how we best deliver their rehabilitation and design services that are as efficient and effective as possible. Failure to provide effective rehabilitation is costly. In the case of acquired brain injury (ABI), where Goal Manager was initially developed, the annual cost to society is estimated to be £15 billion, equivalent to approximately 10% of the total annual National Health Service (NHS) budget (All-Party Parliamentary Group on ABI, September 2018). The Data Dashboard will enable quick and easy analysis of routinely collected clinical data to enable us to answer many unanswered questions about what works best and for whom in rehabilitation. This data will in turn allow us to reconfigure and design services which are maximally effective for the individuals requiring them by enabling services to interrogate their data and compare these standardised datasets across different services quickly and easily. We will be able to improve access to healthcare for all, to maximise clinical outcomes and to reduce inefficiencies, thus saving money for the NHS and the public by supporting resources to be most effectively targeted.