Industry / Topic: Health | Hospital Medication Errors
Project Title: Future Therapy
Host / Client: National Hospital within the EU | Client Confidential
Design Brief: How might improving an existing design or developing a new one help nurses in the future to overcome the limitations in the interaction, usability and management of the therapy using the therapy trolley, when preparing and administering therapies?
Delivered Solution: Juvo and Juvo Junior – new hospital trolleys and a new patient-focussed drug and patient management eco-system.
Team: Gina Garvey, Christina Sadek, Fryza Pavitta P, Piti Pravichpaibul
My Role: My role covered all of the design process but I give special credit to my two team mates for storyboarding and drawings that brought our sketches and post it notes of JUVO and Juvo Jnr trolleys to life!
Process Highlights: This project was extensive in the range of design tools we used; observational and analagous research, problem definition uncovered the most basic functional problems (current hospital trolleys are too wide to fit through doors into patient’s rooms) to ‘back stage’ problems such as patient record systems, team handover meetings on the ward and visitor behaviour. We quickly prototyped several concepts (including vacuum based tubing to deliver individualised medicine direct to patient rooms) and tested with the client.
We quickly discovered that designing a new trolley would not address medication errors alone, but that we needed to design an end to end ecosystem ensuring all touchpoints of medication, patient records, nurses’ station and patient experience were considered. It was important that less effort not more, would be required to reduce medication errors and that a system could be flexible and sustainable into the future.
Analagous research – airplane trolleys
