DESIGN THINKING IN PATIENT-CENTRICITY IN HOSPITALS

Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.

The situation that required me to experiment some of the concepts of Design  Thinking was a workshop on Patent-Centricity that I was conducting for para-clinical  and technical support staff for a large hospital based out of southern India. There  were close to 25 participants and we were looking at the problem of Abuse in Health  Care (AHC).

Selection: In your own words, briefly describe the tool you selected (e.g., what  it is and why you selected it for your challenge.

I experimented with a combination of visualization and story-telling by blending both  of these concepts together to construct a coherent narrative through which  participants could discuss and understand how abuse in health care can be  addressed and contained.

Application: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge  (e.g., what you did and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).

Participants were given chart papers and were asked to define their identity as  patient care workers by using pictures that they could either draw or cut out of  magazines which were supplied to them. As a next step, the participants were  grouped together into groups of 5 members and were asked to stitch together visuals  from each other and explore commonalities and differentiators, both of which helped  them blend and synergise and also identify elements which were discordant and  which may be incongruent to their identities as health care workers. The discussions  were meant to encourage discourse between the participants as the search for a  wholesome identity was explored by members from these cross functional units that  we had put together as teams. Team members were also encouraged to explore  their own experiences as patient parties and share some of their experiences that  could resonate within the group and enable a deeper understanding of excellence in  patient care. Each team had to share at least one narrative as a patient party and  then explore roles and role reversals.

The story-telling component utilised a narrative from the Mahabaratha, which is an  Indian epic and which explored the concept of empathy and solution finding by  exploring character identities and what-if scenarios by choosing characters with  whom the teams empathised and played out the narrative. The other team members  which acted as spectators were encouraged to query and point out character flaws  and strengths in understanding growth and decline of the characters in the narrative  that was shared.

Insight: Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your  challenge (e.g., how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and about  design thinking more broadly).

The outcome gave a few insights as a training facilitator on the efficacy of using  design principles in exploring solution finding for a complex problem such as patient- centricity in hospitals. Primary, was the enthusiasm amongst the participants in  exploring solutions through the use of creative tools such as visualisation and story- telling since we are all naturally gifted story tellers – some using language and also  non-language based narrative development. The workshop encouraged me to keep  experimenting with the use of design principles and we were later encouraged, as  groups, to deploy one tangible solution to enable patient-centricity at the hospital  which we monitored and developed over the next 6 months. Solutions that grew out  of this workshop enabled technological development of patient management,  improvements in dietary areas as well as greater synergy amongst key para and  technical units to work in greater harmony by placing the patient at the centre of   care giving.

Approach: Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same tool  you selected or a different one -- and the reason(s) why.

What I want to explore is how another group in another hospital would respond to a  similar set of tools that are deployed in patient care. Would there be consistency in  solution finding? Would another group from another geography and hospital behave  differently and if so, what would the differences be?

