Consensus Process for Content Development: Charlie's House Virtual Safety Experience (VSE)

Richard Gist, PhD
Joseph M Colella, CPST-I
Danny Feldman
Bob Renton, MPA

Charlie's House, the nation's only dedicated safety demonstration home, has greatly expanded the reach and accessibility of its safety education efforts through an innovative, highly interactive Virtual Safety Experience (VSE). This platform, developed with the support of Amazon and its web development contractors, brings the multifaceted safety education capabilities of Charlie's House directly into the hands of parents, caregivers, providers, and educators. Within the first full year following launch, the VSE was viewed 19,451 times and recorded 6,338 downloads of our iOS and Android apps, vastly expanding the reach of the physical house itself. Rapid expansion of reach and broadening of impact demands a consistent, systematic approach to ensuring the accuracy and applicability of the information disseminated.

Multiple aspects of advocacy, research, practice, pedagogy, and technology must be integrated to ensure accurate, up to date, and efficacious delivery of information and mitigation strategies across a range of consumers, and to keep the messaging aligned with the evolution of the field over time. Charlie's House developed a consensus process blending input from critical areas of expertise to achieve the best possible input to identify of instructional needs, determine the salient elements of each element or module, formulate effective strategies for instruction, and present these in the most efficacious fashion possible. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) convene via virtual meeting platforms as experienced facilitators guide them through the consensus process in conjunction with web developers to design, formulate, and assess delivery strategies. Web developers then present drafts which are subsequently vetted, refined, and revised in conjunction with the SME groups. Vetted versions are beta tested among informed users to establish the final product prior to full launch. SMEs also guide and review evaluation of the active product following launch.

Following successful launch of the initial VSE in 2024, we have received support from various sources to build additional modules and expand/enhance existing modules to more thoroughly address key risk elements. The SME process has evolved along with the platform, now representing a truly national range of expertise and input. A critical aspect in its success has been the capacity to blend a wide diversity of expertise into effective, state of the art/state of the science presentation of information, and to ensure applicability across the widely diverse consumer populations utilizing the platform.

Different types and elements of expertise often present competing views. That competition of viewpoints is essential to the evolution of science but can cloud the capacity of consumers to absorb and act upon the information. This is compounded further by the constraints of web-based delivery. Building consensus across a range of expertise and viewpoints helps ensure that the information ultimately delivered in such formats represents the best synthesis of current data and opinion in order to ensure maximum efficacy and impact at the consumer level.

1. How different forms of expertise apply to formulating specific approaches to education and intervention.

2. The critical importance of bringing many varieties of expertise together to ensure the most accurate, up to date, and effective approaches to addressing critical matters in safety education.

3. The role of Subject Matter Expert (SME) consensus panels in building efficacious tools to deliver safety education broadly and accessibly through technologic platforms.