All my work on children’s rights started with the work I developed on children’s rights in health care. This has, without a doubt, been my most valuable and exciting piece of work, where I have learned the most; and it paved the way for me to be able to develop a child rights-based approach in other settings. None of this work would have been possible without the passionate commitment of many wonderful professionals I worked with in hospitals and universities around the world, and in the World Health Organization and this reinforces my belief that the human side of things is as important as the professional side. I started working with Fabrizio Simonelli in 2008 at the Health Promotion Department of the Meyer Paediatric Hospital in Florence, Italy, as one of those life random chances. At the time, the office was also recognised as a WHO Collaborating Centre, so we did a lot of work with both hospitals and the WHO Regional Office for Europe; and we coordinated a Task Force on Health Promotion for Children and Adolescents in and by Hospitals, in the context of the International Health Promoting Hospitals Network. In 2009, we published the first self-evaluation model and tool on children’s rights in hospital and in 2010, I was invited by the Portuguese High Commissioner for Health to join their team and from there I lead the development of the Manual and Tools for the Assessment of Children’s Rights in Hospital. After this, I started a long collaboration with WHO to develop other tools and processes to use the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a framework to improve quality of care for children. To cite just an example of this work: In 2014, I drafted a set of tools to assess children’s rights in primary health care, specifically five tools for managers, professionals, children of two age groups and parents, based on child rights standards, such as quality of care, participation, protection from violence and the right to play. I was then invited to pilot these tools in Uzbekistan in February 2015, where I carried out a two-day training workshop on children’s rights, followed by a field testing of the tools. The outcome of this work is explained in the publication Assessment and Improvement of Children’s Rights in Health Care: Piloting Training and Tools in Uzbekistan. This publication is also available in Russian.

Information on all this work is further developed in the articles Using the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a basis to improve quality of care and referenced in Publications in this website.

In 2022, I started a series of books entitled Children’s Rights in Practice and I have dedicated the first number to Children’s Rights in Healthcare Practice: A Guide for Doctors, Nurses and Other Health Care Professionals.