Medicine has long been one of the most fertile areas for design because of the stakes – life or death – and because the insurmountable burden of care placed on doctors and nurses means any help is a godsend.
There are wonderful examples of innovation in high tech medical equipment, from IDEO’s insulin pen (this is how it works) to the many great entries in competitions like the International Design Excellence Awards and the more specialised Medical Design Excellence Awards.
However, it is small, low tech changes that can make just as much of a difference. There is a great passage in Atul Gawande’s wonderful book Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance
Maybe there were smarter ways:
“A few years ago, Paul O’Neill, the former secretary of the Treasury and CEO of aluminium giant Alcoa, agreed to take over as head of a regional health care initiative in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And he made solving the problem of hospital infections one of his top priorities. To show it could be solved, he arranged for a young industrial engineer named Peter Perreiah to be put on a single forty-bed surgical unit at a Pittsburgh veterans hospital.
“When he met with the unit’s staff”, a doctor who worked on the project told me, “Peter didn’t ask, ‘Why don’t you wash your hands?’ He asked, ‘Why can’t you?’” By far the most common answer was time. So, as an engineer, he went about fixing the things that burned up the staff’s time. He came up with a just-in-time supply system that kept not only gowns and gloves at the bedside but also gauze and tape and other things the staff needed, so they didn’t have to go back and forth out of the room to search for them. Rather than make everyone clean their stethoscopes, notorious carriers of infection, between patients, he arranged for each patient room to have a designated stethoscope on the wall. He helped make dozens of simplifying changes that reduced both the opportunities for spread of infection and the difficulties of staying clean. He made each hospital room work more like an operating room, in other words. He also arranged for a nasal culture to be taken from every patient upon admission, whether the patient seemed infected or not. That way the staff knew which patient carried resistant bacteria and could preemptively use more stringent precautions for them- “search-and-destroy” the strategy is sometimes called. Infection rates for MRSA – the hospital contagion responsible for more deaths than any other – fell by almost 90 percent, from four to six infections a month to about that many in an entire year.”
“Two years later, however, despite encouragement and exhortation, the ideas had spread to only one other unit in the hospital. Those other units didn’t have Perreiah. And when he left the original unit for a different project elsewhere, performance for that unit began to slide, too. O’Neill quit the project in frustration. Nothing fundamental had changed.”
Every single company and individual should look at ways they can improve – Kaizen is not just for car manufacturers. Atul puts it with great eloquence:
“Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from deliberate, even obsessive, reflections on failure and a constant searching for new solutions. These are difficult traits to foster – but they are far from impossible ones.”
Though beautifully put, this ignores one thing. It’s not just a question of character and personality. The methodology of design contains all the tools to help anyone on this path.
Yet another reason why design thinking is so crucial.
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