Virtual Design Sprint
Healthcare Excellence Canada
Client
The Problem
Patient safety is essential in a high-quality healthcare system and yet attention has stagnated and is not seen as a priority in the health system. Healthcare Excellence Canada wanted to take a fresh look at this challenge and engage clinicians and patients with the hope to find a new approach to reinvigorating safety. Our starting question for this sprint is: “How might we better engage patients and their care partners to help care become safer”.
The Process
As part of this design sprint, The Pivot Group conducted interviews with 8 health care providers and 8 patients. The interviews were informal and qualitative in nature with the goal to understand the experience and perspectives from the patients and providers. The information from the providers was translated to 3 healthcare provider personas and 1 patient persona. These personas were purposefully memorable with key select information on their story, goals, pain points and emotions. During the design sprint the personas were shaped to drive the conversation on pain points of our users. A journey map was created to highlight the emotions patients and providers might experience during their healthcare visit.
Interviews, Personas and Journey Map
We had 13 people as part of the design team with representation across the country and inclusive of patients, nurses, physicians, administrators and representatives from Healthcare Excellence Canada. The membership had a deep and experiential knowledge base (close to the front line and first hand experience) which increases the chance that the design sprint produces valuable prototypes.
The introductory session and three design workshops (120 minutes long) were held over a period of 6 weeks. All sessions were supported by two facilitators with the use of MURAL as an interactive tool during the zoom sessions.
Design Workshops
#1 Understanding and Defining Workshop
Purpose: Generating many ideas based on the identified challenges
#2 Ideation Workshop
Purpose: Generating many ideas based on the identified challenges
#3 Prototyping Workshop
Purpose: Describing the core elements of the top two ideas
The Outcome
After review of the top ideas and the presentations - the group prioritized two ideas for prototyping. One was to bring Care Opinion to Canada and the other was to create a Chief Safety Officer program across Canada.
TOP 2 IDEAS
Care Opinion Canada
Care Opinion is a UK independent non-profit feedback platform for health and social care. Over 500 organizations are using Care Opinion to listen to what patients, service users and carers are saying. Care opinion works with health and care providers, commissioners, health boards, regulators, professional bodies, educators, researchers and patient groups. Care Opinion has since been adopted by Scotland and Australia.
Chief Safety Officer
Chief Safety Officer (CSO) is a new position in the healthcare setting. This concept is borrowed from the military where they have flight safety officers. The CSO is a front line clinician who holds this position for 3 months at a time and their core function is to escalate safety issues upwards in the organization or unit. They act like a flight safety officer. They are reassigned to have fresh eyes on the system. They will be given advanced training on safety and culture/communication issues.This position needs to have a shallow reporting structure – create a “superhighway” for safety concerns to leadership. For example; report directly to the operation lead of the hospital (not the unit manager).
What We Created
