Silcworm is a Quality of Life survey for children aged 4 to 10 years with an illness/disability.

Paediatric doctors at University College London (UCL) have developed a quality of life measure for children aged 4 to 10 with medical conditions, including growth conditions.

It has been shown by lots of research that given the same set of circumstances a child will give different interpretations of their quality of life than that of their parent/carer. A Department of Health report identified a need for a quality of life measure, self-scored (ie by the child).

The doctors at UCL have developed a novel way of doing this using an interactive computer 'game' which children love filling in. They call the game e-SILCWORM and would like to get as many children as possible with medical conditions to use the game on their website at www.wazdaka.com/silcworm/.

Feel free to try the game yourself, but please write 'test' in the condition box (unless you have a child with you!).

A lot of conditions which affect children have no information regarding quality of life - another potential outcome of helping with this research is answering this issue for other families.