Designing Better Healthcare Can Sometimes Be About Appreciating Simplicity
If you see Dr. Rob Hackett, a Sydney based anesthesiologist, you’ll know him right away. After all, his name and profession are written on his medical cap. And with good reason. Stepping up tp a crowd of some 20 responders to a cardiac arrest patient he asked for gloves but, not recognizing him and thinking that he was talking to someone behind her, the nurse delayed. At your local coffee shop this delay maybe be inconvenient but in a high pressure emergency surgery it can be life or death.
In surgery everyone has most of their face covered making them hard to recognize. Add to this the fact that you might be working with a team that you don’t know well and the chances of people not knowing you, what role you are serving or who you are talking to and you have possible points of failure. From student physicians being asked to do procedures they are unqualified to do to delays simple because you don’t know someones name.
Hire traditional business consultants to deal with this and you can only imagine the complex and costly solution delivered in a multi slide powerpoint(less) deck. But in true design thinking fashion Dr. Hackett decided to try something — he wrote “ROB anesthetist” across his surgery cap. And soon others started doing it as well. And they started posting phones of themselves doing it.
Soon Alison Brindle, a UK midwife student, saw the photos and starting doing it as well. She created the social media hashtag #TheatreCapChallenge to spread the new practice. Now, from the UK to the US, medical teams are adopting this simple idea.
As designers, especially in healthcare, it teaches us some things. First, there are great ideas being designed by “non-designers” all the time and we should often start by looking for what is working before trying to design the next thing. Second, good ideas need someone to carry they forward and amplify them just like Alison Brindle did with her hashtag. Healthcare in specific has a challenge changing and adopting new practices so designers need to find ways to spread the word and accelerating adoption in simple ways.
It is these simple ideas and simple ways of sharing them that often get overlooked when we are trying to improve a system, process, service or experience. But they exist and they can be powerful and impactful. We just need to be willing to see them, champion them and push them forward and accept that some of the best innovation is about amplifying what is already happening.
#designthinking #healthcarebydesign #servicedesign #healthcare
(see the article here: https://doyouremember.com/68522/fellow-doctors-laugh-doctors-awkward-decision-writing-name-cap-not-realizing-saves-lives )
