Challenge
Improve the ER staff working condition, which tends to be exposed to dramatic stress and workload level. Train the healthcare professionals to adopt a new approach to copy with a continuously evolving context characterized by scarce resources, equipment and staff, and an increasing in-flow of patients.
How might we improve ER staff working experience and create an internal team of practitioners capable of continually adapting solutions and responding creatively to the context changes?
Solution
The final output consisted of four solutions; two were process changes, supported by an redesign of some digital tools. The third solutions required infrastructural changes in the hospital building, and were both approved, financed, and implemented. (One of them is the ER waiting room redesign) We also modified the IT system to improve the process tracking and spot the bottlenecks.
Prototypes and Living Prototypes
1
Creation of an ER innovation team: physicians, nurses, and aid nurses were gathered for the first time around the same table to collaborate and develop solutions to improve their working conditions.
2
Context research: I spent about 1 month observing the healthcare professionals working on their environment, interviewing them, and researching the emergency room and healthcare field. The final goal was to understand the ER process and the ER staff's needs
3
4
Problem framing: Due to the complexity of the emergency room environment, it has been challenging to identify the main problem to focus on. Furthermore, most of the issues mentioned during the interviews were perception-based and needed validation. We tested them with the healthcare staff in several ways: data collection, computational scenarios, experiments and live prototypes.
Ideation and definition: The healthcare staff's involvement in the ideation phase was necessary to design a solution adapted to each category's needs and accepted by the majority of the hospital personnel. The definition of the solution required to me the switch from having a role of designer enabler, to my intervention as a full service designer.
User journeys
The ER waitng room after we have redesigned it.
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