How to Educate and Inspire the Next Generation of Medical Professionals Through Play: Jennifer Griffard’s Perspective

EP028_06-11-24_Jennifer Griffard

Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Toy Business Unboxed, your gateway to the secrets of the toy industry. Here, Jason Hsieh, a toy entrepreneur and expert in the field. “Every product we develop is really inspired by some of the real life experience that we have with our son.” “60 percent of all toys last year were sold on Amazon.”

“Be passionate about it. Because it’s a road. It’s a journey.” “Like when you have an idea that you think is gonna somewhat change the world, make things better, I’d say go for it.“

Jason Hsieh: Welcome to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed. I’m your host, Jason Hsieh. On today’s podcast, we are thrilled to have Jennifer, the Chief Operating Officer of Little Medical School, as our guest.

Jennifer’s journey from being a doctor, and with a love for role playing to [00:01:00] leading the educational franchise. Little Medical School is truly inspiring. We’ll be exploring how Little Medical School works and the after school program they have, the toy line they have, and how they are really engaging with children and inspiring them to pursue career in healthcare through the wonderful program and product that Jennifer and her company offer. Thank you for joining us today on the podcast, Jennifer. 

Jennifer Griffard: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here today. 

Jason Hsieh: I’m excited to dive in a little bit deeper and learn a little bit more about your business. First of all, can you tell the audience more about your childhood experience and how does that inspire you to start the little medical school as of today?

Jennifer Griffard: Sure. My dad is a retired physician and my brother is a physician and my sister was a nurse. And so I’ve grown up in the medical field, watching my dad, watching my brother. I always wanted to be a teacher too. I’ve had multiple jobs throughout my career where I worked at the hospital for six years [00:02:00] and got that hands on experience. And then I’ve worked with various different doctors and other aspects. Then I found a little medical school and it was just getting started as a business. It was created by Dr. Mary Mason here in St. Louis, Missouri. She created it because she was actually speaking to one of her children’s classrooms and talking about what it’s like to be a doctor, why she chose to become a doctor.

And in doing so, she decided there’s not a lot out there to help educate kids about healthcare careers and get them excited. So she decided to create little medical school and the first little doctor program, and that was back in 2010. I joined her in 2013 and have been helping her grow the business and creating the toy line and bringing in franchisees to help spread our curriculum around the country and internationally.

Jason Hsieh: [00:03:00] What was the aha moment that lead to the creation of the first little medical school lesson? 

Jennifer Griffard: There was nothing out there to help educate kids and they don’t get that real hands on experience with real medical tools. So for instance, in our very first program it’s called a little doctor school and the first class is called what’s in the doctor’s bag. The students get a real working stethoscope, they learn how to put it together, they learn how to use it and then we teach them how to do blood pressures, we teach them how to use the reflex hammer and then they do an exam like with their partner and stuff like doing checking their vital signs and getting a feel for why is a doctor listening to my heart? Why is a doctor checking my reflexes? And helping children better understand why doctors are doing these things, because of that we have had kids who were so afraid to go to the doctor that are no longer afraid because [00:04:00] they’re walking into their doctor’s office going, Oh, I know what that is and I know why you’re going to use it on me. And it alleviates that stress and anxiety that kids have when they go to the doctor. So that is one of the aha moments I think that we’ve had over the years too is there’s just not a lot of education out there or teaching kids basic life saving skills, which we do in the afterschool setting and in the summer camp setting, teaching CPR, Heimlich, first aid, how to tie tourniquets, things that they’re not learning during the day to day school, we’re teaching them in the afterschool setting.

Jason Hsieh: That’s wonderful. Yeah. Thank you for doing that. That’s definitely very unique. 

Jennifer Griffard: Yes. 

Jason Hsieh: I know you also have a whole toy line that is part of your business model. Can you explain to the audience how does that idea come about and what make it unique? 

Jennifer Griffard: So the reason we decided to do the toys was, we had a couple of students come to one of our summer camps and they were visiting their [00:05:00] grandparents and their grandparents had signed them up for one of our camps. But when they went back to their home state, they were looking for more little medical school programs to get the kids involved us and we’re like, unfortunately we don’t have a franchise in your state and doctor mason and I just kind of sort of thinking maybe we could create some toys based around our curriculum and bring it to the masses and do something that’s different. When you see medical kits at the stores, everything is the plastic, the fake, and while that’s great and all, we love the idea of using the real medical equipment.

So in our toys, we do sell real stethoscopes in four different colors. We do incorporate some of those stethoscopes in a couple of our activity kits. But a lot of our product is based around role play. Kids love to role play. If whether it’s one of our vet toys or a pediatrician toy or a wilderness survival set, whatever it may be, [00:06:00] there’s gonna be some kind of medically related tool. Real medical tool that encompasses our toys. We wanted something different to bring to the market that you don’t typically see. That’s what created our toy line is for the folks where states or countries where we don’t have a franchise, this allows them access to some of our programs.

Jason Hsieh: You mentioned about a few real medical tool. Can you describe a few of them that’s in the kit? 

Jennifer Griffard: Yes. So in the kits and the toy kits, we do use the real working stethoscopes. Those do come in four different colors. We also utilize a five and one survival tool in our wilderness survival set and that is to teach kids when they’re hiking or they’re going out with friends, just the safety using the whistle or using the compass, if they get lost, it’s teaching them these basic skills. One could need in any kind [00:07:00] of situation. 

Jason Hsieh: Do you have any product in the room right now that you can show the audience what it looked like?

Jennifer Griffard: Not if I had known before I would have had, I can always grab some if need be, like I said, we have lots of we use syringes, like not with needles, obviously, but teaching kids how to draw different medications or drawing blood. We have our new echo, the dolphin, which is that Topia that comes with a syringe, which teaches them how to draw blood out of the tail flukes of a dolphin and we do Tommy John surgery and our sport surgeon kit. That’s very popular surgery on the elbow for that a lot of baseball players go through. We created a surgical board and it has a picture of the elbow and some holes drilled in it. And then they do the tendon transfer. So it’s a role. 

Jason Hsieh: Okay. Very specific. 

Jennifer Griffard: Yep. They get to make a ball and socket joint and a hinge joint. They learn about all the bones in their body. They learn how to take care of sprains and strains. There’s a lot [00:08:00] of learning how to split a broken leg is in our Wilderness Survival Kit. There’s lots of really useful and helpful things that kids are learning through our Educational STEM Activity Kits. 

Jason Hsieh: I want to transition and talk about your after school program and the summer camp that your company provides and how does that compliment with the educational toys that your company also offers?

Jennifer Griffard: We can actually teach a program with our toys. So somebody said, Hey, could you come? We’ll buy the toys and then you could do some extra activities, even with the kit. And then you could bring in some extra activities to do with the toys, but our afterschool programs and our summer camps, we have over 400 hours of programming from little doctor, school, nursing, pharmacy, three veterinarian programs. Actually, we just came out with our fourth. We just came out with a new marine biology summer camp that talks about sea turtles and then we [00:09:00] have sports medicine, pediatrician, wilderness, we’re just wrote a forensics program, dentistry, nutrition. We have a ton of programming. Our after school programs and summer camps sell out really fast because there’s nobody else doing this. 

Jason Hsieh: What is the typical age group for the kids that’s participating? 

Jennifer Griffard: We do age ranges 4 to 14. We have the teen medical program for the older kiddos, the 12, 13, 14 year olds and then we also just created a program that would be more for your one to three year old and that involves the caregiver as well. Teaching them different things they could try at home, different activities. But I would say our sweet spot of the children that take our programs is probably between the age of five and nine. Our veterinarian programs and our little doctor program are incredibly popular. We have two dog programs, a cat program, a horse program, and then we just created the marine biology program.

All children [00:10:00] want to be vets. We had a little girl come to one of our camps last summer and she showed up to camp every single day in a new pair of scrubs, different colors with her name embroidered on them. Her mom was like, my daughter just loves all things medicine and she’s just excited, she wants to be a doctor when she gets older. And this little girl came to our camp every day, just ready to go in her little uniform with a Smile on her face and just was excited to learn.

Jason Hsieh: It’s important to make the play more fun and educational at the same time. That’s a whole point. I just got back from the certified play expert program, the Astra around, and that’s what they teach about child development and the importance of incorporating play into the educational setting. Because who wants to listen to a boring lecture, right? 

Jennifer Griffard: Exactly. And that’s what we teach our instructors when they’re hired to teach our programs, the kids have been sitting in school all day to come to us and want this to [00:11:00] be an experience, but we also want them to learn some stuff too. So it’s very minimal lecture and more hands on learning what it’s like to do anything and everything. 

Jason Hsieh: Are there some of the key benefit to child gain from role playing as a health care professional in your program? 

Jennifer Griffard: It helps alleviate some of that stress and anxiety about going to a doctor’s appointment for themself, because now they have a better understanding of why the doctor is doing the things that they’re doing at their appointments. That has been one of the biggest benefits. Something else too, that we get a lot of phone calls about from parents is the fact that we’re teaching life saving skills. We had a dad who got injured and their child ran and got their first aid kit that they had created in our class, brought it out and gave his dad first aid, splinted his leg and did all the [00:12:00] stuff that he was supposed to do. 

Different things like that, that have had a true impact. And then you’ve got kids that have had no like real education about what are my lungs do? How does my heart work? What is digestion? We have a great activity around digestion where they’re using buckets and strainers and spoons and spray bottles to learn about how digest and they digestion works, and then they get to play all those different roles. Someone’s the mouth, someone’s the saliva digestive juices, someone’s the stomach, the small intestine, the large intestine, and then what we call the end. And the kids love it and they want to keep doing it over and then they’re remembering, oh, this is how digestion works. And they love it. They love playing that. They love going home and taking care of grandma and grandpa and their dog or their cat. We give them little lab coats. They get just little white lab coats and we do a graduation ceremony at the end of every program. We [00:13:00] invite the parents to come and the kids put on a presentation of everything they learned. Parents can see the value of what their kids learned during our programs. And then we carry that into the toys. So there is a graduation diploma in all of our activity kits. Everything’s laminated, everything’s reusable. We made everything just real easy and accessible to be able to play with that multiple times. 

Jason Hsieh: I see. And I was checking your website. Look like you guys also run birthday party. Can you talk about the birthday party too? 

Jennifer Griffard: We do. We have several different birthday parties. We call it prescribe your own party. A child can choose from, they want to be a doctor, they could have a little doctor party. We have a lot of kids that do the vet parties. So whether it’s a dog, a cat, a horse, they can choose which one. We have a, that is gross. That’s snot and flatulence. The boys love that one. We have a pediatrician birthday program. We have a wilderness survival birthday [00:14:00] program. If they just have something that they really like, a forensics, if they wanted to do a forensics birthday, we could do that too, where they could solve a crime and all that kind of stuff. 

Jason Hsieh: That’s definitely a variety of stuff. I’ll definitely share that with my wife, maybe for the next birthday party. We have three kids, so 14, 10 and six. 

Jennifer Griffard: They’re the perfect ages. 

Jason Hsieh: What advice do you have for other businesses looking to launch their own toy line? Because it sounds like you guys also have quite a bit of success launching your own toy line on top of the program. You guys have. 

Jennifer Griffard: My biggest takeaway from all of this that in all the years I’ve been doing this now, I think we’re going on 11 years, is the size of your packaging. I mean we have drastically changed from really big to getting smaller and smaller, because what I’ve learned from retailers is it’s all about how it fits on their shelves.

Jason Hsieh: True, yeah. That applies online as well, you don’t want the packaging to be too big, [00:15:00] the shipping costs. 

Jennifer Griffard: The shipping costs, exactly. It’s paying attention to your retailers. They’re the ones that are buying. They’re the ones that are putting you on their shelves. You want to make sure you’re putting out a product that is eye catching and that is a little unique and different and not like everything else. We’ve recently just changed a lot of our packaging. Like with the Vetopia line. Turning the actual package into, so we have a cow and a dolphin and the cow looks like a barn and when the box opens up, it opens up into the habitat or what we’re calling.

Jason Hsieh: Oh yeah, I saw it on the website. Yeah. 

Jennifer Griffard: Yeah, so the whole entire kit is getting used and then they get to do the exam on the cow like a veterinarian would do. They learn what about dairy cows and they get to watch a video of a real dairy cow being milked. And so changing that packaging was huge for us. The stores are like, Oh my gosh, this is great, it’s a little bit smaller. It can be [00:16:00] stacked. Lots to think about. Don’t come out with something that’s going to take up a ton of shelf space because a lot of times retailers will walk right past your booth or walk right past your toy and yeah, that’s not going to look good on my shelf or that’s too big for my shelf and that’s something that I’ve learned over the years and I’m excited with our direction. 

Jason Hsieh: Can you describe how does a franchise model of the little medical school work? And what are some of the opportunities out there for people that’s also want to maybe get into a franchise business model. 

Jennifer Griffard: We started franchising little medical school in 2015 and that was after getting phone calls from various States where kids have taken our classes like to visit their grandparents and another state and they want it in their state and so we were like let’s franchise it. So we started franchising in 2015, and when you franchise, you get a protected territory, so you basically give us a couple zip codes and then we build the territory for [00:17:00] you. You would service all the schools, public, private, religious, community centers, parks, departments, libraries, hospitals, that the beautiful thing about little medical school is we don’t use any technology. We’re trying to get kids away from the screen. Get away from the screen. I could run a little medical school program in the middle of a park. No problems. We could do all the activities that go into that program and the kids will have a blast.

It’s easy to run our programs. It’s easy to run them in all different places. We’ve run at churches, hospitals. We do programs with different children’s hospitals where kids who are in the hospital for lengthy stays, we do a virtual program with them. We ship some of our products to the hospital, they quarantine the product and then we allow the child to kind be of a doctor for 30 minutes or nurse or what our [00:18:00] vet, whatever program we’re doing, and takes their mind off of their illness or why they’re in the hospital. 

Jason Hsieh: Do you also offer that to childhood cancer patients? 

Jennifer Griffard: We would do it for any child. Yes. Any child. And sometimes it’s really great for the siblings of children who might have cancer, who might have some kind of a long lasting illness. They take our classes and then they learn, okay, why is my brother or sister going through all of this? And it helps teach them maybe I can help them in this way, and this is how I can support my, sibling in that way.

Jason Hsieh: The reason why I ask is actually passion my real life experience. My daughter was diagnosed with leukemia in 2017. And I remember going to taking her to the hospital and it was a two and a half years of chemotherapy or the treatment. It was putting a lot of stress on her to the point she’s afraid to get go to hospital because [00:19:00] of the needles that people are putting into her. I wish I have known your program. Otherwise I’ll definitely use it with her to really help her overcome some of the Like mental area. She still have nightmare about it. Like many years. 

Jennifer Griffard: That’s a lot for a little child to go through and just educating them and educating their siblings on why. We just came out with an emergency medical program and that teaches kids. So a lot of kids have diabetes or epilepsy or severe allergies to foods and other medications and things like that. So if we educate our youth on these types of diseases, then they’ll better understand what their friends are going through. Why is my friend, giving themselves insulin every day? We’re teaching them why and how they can better help their friends or if your friend has a seizure, what to do. 

All of the programs that we have or whatever the schools are. Some, a lot of times the schools will tell you what they want and then we do a lot of stuff with the Girl [00:20:00] Scouts and the Boy Scouts helping them learn. Various badges and things like that. So there’s a lot of opportunity. We’re really looking for franchise owners that a have a passion for teaching and love kids and just want to bring something different to the market. There is no other franchise like little medical school out there. You have your robotics, you have your coding, you have your bricks, your Legos and things like that. But little medical school is unique and it’s bringing something different to children in a really smart and fun way. 

Jason Hsieh: That’s another area I’m super passionate about is the area of special needs, especially with autism. Because my son is on the autism spectrum. My entire business is dedicated to create toys for kids on the spectrum and with sensory needs.

Do you have any special program for Kids with special needs or with sensory issues?

Jennifer Griffard: We have tweaked a lot of [00:21:00] our programs. My niece has Down syndrome and my sister, her mom they worked out a program to teach to Down syndrome children. So what we do is if we have a child who has Down syndrome or a child that has autism and we’re informed about it ahead of time we’ll try to make sure that we tweak the curriculum a little bit to better help them and have a more enjoyable experience. For instance, we had a child that does not like the feel of clay and we use clay to make a humorous bone. We, made sure that child did not come in contact with the clay and we chose something different that he got to pick out that better helped him understand. So when parents tell us ahead of time, Hey, my child just our sound, or so sometimes we can make sure we’re a little bit [00:22:00] more quiet or children that have that touch, that, that sensory to touch and different things. We’re always trying to tweak the best we can to accommodate all of our students. 

Jason Hsieh: Yeah, but I guess my question is beyond just accommodation, but do you have a special kid that teach other kids about autism? 

Jennifer Griffard: Not yet, but we have been, contacted by a few companies that would like to work together to create.

Jason Hsieh: I would love to partner with you guys. That might be of your interest. That’s my passion. 

Jennifer Griffard: Yeah. 

Jason Hsieh: And that’s what I’ve been doing since 2016.

Jennifer Griffard: I would love to talk to you more about that. That would be a wonderful thing to bring to the market. 

Jason Hsieh: Yeah. And we can co brand it, co market it. We have a small email list, about 20, 000 parents. With special needs, and I think that would be a great tool to bring awareness, not just for the kids on the spectrum, but for all the other people that are trying to get to know them better. 

Jennifer Griffard: Yes. Agreed. That sounds wonderful. We’ll definitely talk about that.

Jason Hsieh: Wrapping [00:23:00] up today’s interview the final question I’d like to ask all the guests is if you had to share just one piece of advice with someone that’s just getting started in the toy industry, what would that be? 

Jennifer Griffard: Be very thoughtful about what you’re bringing to the market and do your research. Be very diligent about that research. What I mean is look to see what else is out there, who you’re going to be competing against and make it different. Make it something that isn’t already on the shelf because it just, it brings that competition level to a whole, just really changes it. So be really thoughtful when you’re creating. Be really thoughtful when you’re thinking about what you’re gonna put on the shelves or what you’re gonna sell online. You wanna make sure that you’re standing out and you’re bringing something really great into a child’s life and how is it going to benefit them. Just be really thoughtful in that process. That’s what I’ve definitely learned over the years. 

Jason Hsieh: Got it. Thank you for sharing that. And where can the audience find you? 

Jennifer Griffard: We’re at littlemedicalschool.com and we’re based here in St. Louis, [00:24:00] Missouri, where we just had the Astra show and that was really fun. And if you are interested in the franchise or interested in our toys I’m Jen Griffard and you can always email me too. I’m on the website as well. And I just appreciate you giving me the time to talk about the wonderful things that we’re doing. And I’m excited to see where the future leads us.

Jason Hsieh: Yeah, thank you for all the things you are doing for the kids and really help them with not just education, but also like career choices. 

Jennifer Griffard: We already have a shortage of nurses and doctors and big time shortage and it’s our youth that we’re going to need to help us in the future. Whether they decide to go into a healthcare care career or not, at least we’ve given them that basic know how and taught them something useful. 

Jason Hsieh: 100%. Thank you again for your time today on the podcast. Thank you for sharing all the stories and experience that you have. It was a pleasure. 

Jennifer Griffard: Thank you. All right. Have a wonderful day.

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