Adding the child’s first name to consent requests

The problem

During live use, we noticed that some parents were giving consent for the wrong child – for example, an older sibling who had already been vaccinated. In one case, a parent with 14 children simply couldn’t identify which child needed the vaccination. This wasn’t a usability failure of the form itself, it was something you could only see once the service was real and running.

How we responded

1. Identified the real problem

   Parents were completing the form, but for the wrong child. The service was working, but wasn’t delivering the right outcome.

2. Got the right people in the room first

   Before making any changes, we checked with clinical and information governance colleagues. Adding a child’s first name to communication isn’t straightforward in a healthcare context – it needs sign-off from the right people.

3. Made a targeted, minimal change

   We added the child’s first name to the consent request messages – a small, specific content change aimed directly at the problem we had observed.

4. Measured the outcome directly

   We didn’t just look at satisfaction scores. We measured what actually changed: response rates, timeliness, and whether Mavis was outperforming previous methods at the schools using it.

What changed

• ~10% further increase in response rates from adding the child’s name to emails
• 25% faster responses when name personalisation was combined with text + email sending
• +2% overall response rate uplift from the combined changes

Why this is important

Most teams would have looked at an increase in consent completion rates and called it done. We kept watching after launch, spotted a problem that the metrics alone didn’t reveal, made a precise change, and then measured the actual response behaviour. The problem only became visible because the service was live and we were paying attention.