the dirty business of ux in hospitals

Hello

Hi my name’s Tim.

Thanks

Thanks for having me here today and thanks for Donna and the team for putting on such and amazing event.

As UX / CX / ED people we love to geek out about stuff

Personas, journeys etc… I love talking about this stuff too but today I wanted to take a step back.

Why do we do, what we do?

For me I want to craft better experiences for everyone, so we can live long, happy healthy lives.

Australia has an amazing health care system, but as an experience design professional I can’t help but notice the gaps.

“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” - Albert Einstein

Hospital  

Staff  The health care system in Australia has symptoms of a closed system, where change is difficult to achieve.

Lending a hand

I’ve been passionate about this space for a long time, so following my passion I reached out and lent a hand.

Together with Don Campbel.

A partnership with Don Campbell the Director of General Medicine, was formed and we started to talk about how we might work together.

So together with health care professionals we looked at some of the problems they face on a daily basis.

One problem stood out, hand hygiene. Simple how can we get medical professionals to wash their hands and reduce instances of infection in the hospital environment.

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What seems like a small problem turned out to be huge, its estimated 200,000 people acquire infections in Australian hospitals every year and 7,000 die as a result.

The journey

This is where we started our journey, with partners a problem and a goal. Here are some of the insights we garnered from our investigation.

We embedded ourselves at Monash, spending time in the trenches trying to understand the actors, environment and the systems in place.

We learnt about what the rules were. We found a disconnect in the learning styles of the staff and the way the information was being taught.

We struggled with access to staff, learning that they didn’t like being observed by people from outside of the industry.

We were amazed at how good these people are at their job, and the quality of care they provide.

While the rules are good on paper they break in unexpected ways.

The systems extends beyond the doctors and nurses to PCAs, builders, computer techs, physios etc…

Hospitals are littered with hardware that goes unused. When designing in this space we didn’t want to add to the clutter.

Hand washing reminders are everywhere. Which leads to instances of blindness to the visual triggers to wash, but the access couldn’t be better.

We looked at others playing in this space and found that while there were a lot of good solutions, no one solution had managed to solved the problem.

A bump on the road

During all this research we hit a couple of major snags.

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Several staff in the hospital were reluctant to engage us in the problem solving process. So much so that other staff associated with them tool the same stance.

We had too much data and suffered from analysis paralysis. It too months to go through the data and this really stopped our momentum.

Education Product Interaction Monitoring Culture

In the end we settled on five smaller problems to solve, education, product, interaction with patients, monitoring and reporting and the culture in the hospital.

Using these themes we engaged the hospital staff introduced them to our designers and worked through the problems.

What came out of all this?

A lot of great ideas came from these sessions, but beyond these we learnt something special.

Beyond the physical We’re seeing change in the system.

Engaging the hospital staff the way we did, we started to change the way they see the environment. They were able to identify problems and address them.

Thanks

This change in the long run will be more powerful than the tactics that will solve the immediate problems associated with hand washing and infection control. This change with some luck will start to change the system and lead to sustained behaviour change.

Thanks