Patient First Transport
Sunnaas Skyehus is a rehabilitation hospital that specializes in innovative techniques to ensure the best possible outcomes for patients with spinal cord, neurological trauma, rare disorders, strokes, burns, and multi-trauma disorders. While delivering the superior care to the many patients at Sunnaas, the hospital also participates in latest research in technological advancements as well as innovative treatment plans.
Services
Service Design
Role
Designer
Year
2020
Observation
The main issue is transporting patients safely to and from appointments and in a timely manner. Reasons for running late is normally due to miscommunication, issues with moving into the wheelchair, or elevator issues.
Mapping
Some therapist enjoy being able to transport patients, while others do not. Overall, the time to transport patients is usually not accounted for, causing paitents to arrive late to appointments and putting yet another time crunch on busy doctors and nurses.
Interviews
Therapist assistance is not the main mode of transport support, but can transport patients if it is needed. Issues arise when time does not allow for nurses or therapists to transport patients.
Navigating through Sunnaas Skyehus is like walking through a winding maze. It is easy to get disorientated and turned around. While in the hospital I often found myself using the art work within the hospital for reference to orient myself.
Many of the patients felt similarly when navigating through Sunnaas. Especially patients with cognitive troubles. Nursing staff are aware, but do not believe it is the major issue facing transportation delays within the hospital.
To assist with the confusing and sprawling layout of the hospital, there are breadcrumb markers throughout to help assist getting to the various therapy rooms. A solid line of blue leads to physical therapy, and the green dotted line leads to occupational therapy
The creation of a gigamap was used to help me understand how to best design an intervention that would fall under Sunnaas’s mission statement to provide the best services.
A successful intervention at Sunnaas had to align with the values, mission, & professionalism of the hospital. Ensuring safety for patients, as well as hospital staff, combined with environmentally friendly technique. All services must be evidence based, and supported in educationally productive means.
I divided my findings into three sections to support Sunnaas’s mission statement. These three sections are interpretations of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs diagram.
Self-Fulfillment, psychological, and basic needs are represented in the order of importance, with basic needs on the bottom and self-fulfillment on the top. Things such as patients safety are represented within the basic needs category as these must be established first before other needs can be filled.
Solution
I designed a two part intervention system that allowed the patients to be more independent as well as alleviate some of the confusion for the porters.
Patient First Transportation
A visual decision-making aid that allows nurses and hospital staff to use to spark a dialogue with patients about what support they need to manage their transportation needs.
Localized Communication
A visual aid to show the individual schedule, as well as events and classes that are going while at Sunnaas Sykehus. This allows transparency about classes and events. This also allows for patients who are not able to access the browser app that displayed only on the mobile browser.
By using this approach the patient has a clear understanding of their day, and where they can explore other options.
