Currently there might be up to 400 patients queuing to get into hospitals, receiving inappropriate car. What is even worse is Robin Swann said health pressures are “only going to get worse despite the best efforts of staff” and capacity cannot be rebuilt without the "certainty of funding" which gives us little hope when thinking about our health service.
To help think about how we can help improve this, today we completed a Design Sprint in groups based on the question “How might we ease the pressure on Accident & Emergency departments?” This involved us needing to think about the problems they face such as lack of information, intimacy and support after shocking incidents as well as the poor conditions of crowded waiting rooms which bring a lot of anxieties. I think a lot of people feel lost within the hospital system and find it an uncomfortable experience due to the conditions in which they had to wait, their pain, the stress of the results and the overall busy environment.
The design Sprint normally runs in 6 Stages:
We started off by doing some independent research, trying to pinpoint some of the biggest issues there is within the NHS A&E. I looked at recent articles published by reliable sources such as the BBC to get a base idea of the emergency department and social service crisis and begin to look at ways in which we can help improve the system and the structure as designers.
From this we each wrote some some ideas we had generated from our research before picking out a few of our favourites and combining them together for our final ideas.
We chose the following questions to combine to create our final “How Might We” question:
We chose these as we wanted to focus on ways in which we could reform the triage process and help lower the numbers of people coming through and could help improve to make the NHS A&E system run a bit smoother and help digitise it.
To start our personas we created a number of different personas based on people who cause the A&E process to be slowed down and people who help speed it up. This allowed us to get an idea of the different personas and motives of people who use the A&E.
We did not include anything major as these people would not be included in this process as they would be immediately admitted to A&E or fast tracked.
We then each focused on a persona more closely including those who just want reassurance for minor injuries, people who think their injuries are worse than they actually are and people who come knowing the treatments they already need such as stitches. From those personas we were then able to create a set of empathy maps, outlining how each person my feel, think, do and say.
<aside> 💭 This really helped to piece together a range of users who use A&E and how the system is non efficient for them either because they know the extent of their injury and just need treatment or relief or the other users who only attend for reassurance when they have a minor injury.
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