Thanks for turning up, thanks for donna and her team for putting on such event.
Today I’m going to share with you a case study on some of the work I’ve been doing recently. Sorry my photos aren’t great I never intended on using them for anthing other than research.
As ux people we love to geek out about Service design / personas / jouneys / prototyping and all that jazz
I do too but I think if we take a step back
And think about why we really do what we do.
It’s so that we can aspire to having and our families and friends having longer happier lives.
In Australia we’re blessed with an amazing healthcare system. But on further inspection the system is broken.
I’m not sure when the last time any of us was in hospital but as an experience design professional I can’t help but see 100 things that could be improved. The system is broken.
Talking to health care professionals they’re expected to do more and more with less.
But they have a problem. They’re stuck in a loop.
I think he said it best when he said
"The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them." - Albert Einstein
Hospital influences the staff and the staff live in this system.
It’s a closed loop that doen’t lean itself to change.
So together with Porfessor Don Cambel the Director of General Medicine at southern health we started working towards a solution.
One of the problems that came out of the summit was hand washing.
How can we get healthcare workers to wash their hands.
Sounds easy right and almost a waste of time right?
There are much bigger problems to solve.
To give you an idea of how big a problem this is
How many people here have known or been touched/effected by someone with breast cancer, or prostate cancer?
Hospital acquired infections affect about 200,000 patients each year.
Meaning people have actually gone to hospital and ended up in a worse condition as part of their stay.
Of those people who have been infected its estimated that around 7000 will die. That’s more than both breast and prostate cancer combined.
It sounds like a trivial problem, but its not.
We embedded ourselves at Monash medical, for a week we spent time in the trenches to try and understand, who are the actors, and what does the system look like they’re working in.
As outlined by hand hygiene Australia
While reluctant and cold to start with being there with them and being able to emapthise with long shifts, terrible food and hours and hours on our feet. Started to create friendships and partnerships in the system.
So here’s some of the things we learn about the problem and areas we would need to address for a good outcome.
Healthcare professionals give a shit. They’re amazing, they do life saving work under difficult conditions with very little recognition.
Levels of health care professionals
Unexpected situations
Broke the problem down, then prepared information packs around each of these topics.
But I wasn’t all roses, senior staff in the hospital started to get wind of what we were doing, and contrary to our mate einstien belived not only that someone from outside the health industry could do no good, but more than that their very presence in the hospital posed a risk to no only their patients (note the ownership) but also got in the way of them providing quality care.
Because of the hierarchy in the system this discontent spread, working with us was seen as tarnishing their reputation, after all we couldn’t possibly solve this problem without propper medical training and experience.
The second big problem we had was data, we had 100s of data points which produced a couple of months of “analysis paralysis”
Broke the problem down, then prepared information packs around each of these topics.
With the power of beer and pizza, and our packs in hand we convinced hospital staff, and our design team to sit down and work through the problems and opertunities.
While we did a mountain of work to get to this point, all the data in the world is no substitute for having the actors in the system on hand to provide input.
Seeing the process first hand was a turning point for not only the health care professionals but our team embraced the ability to engage these guys first hand.
The harder answer, because its not going to be a quick fix and a tangible.
We’re trying to fix the system.
Emergent systems created by the chaos of ux
The harder answer, because its not going to be a quick fix and a tangible.
