How can we improve relations between patients and clinicians?
Compassion fatigue: Tiredness and trauma from giving compassion. It is experienced through prolonged exposure to trauma. It can negatively impact professional's mental, physical health, their families, people they care for and employing organizations.
Role: Product designer
Team: My advisors - Ranee Lee & Job Rutgers
Platform: Mobile (Native)
Tools: Sketch, Adobe Photoshop, Illustration, InDesign, Arduino
Sector: Mental Health
“Staffs who don’t show their feelings to patients, become hardened are a real issue. Patients not only want good medical care but want to feel that you care for them” - Dr. Ovens, Mount Sinai Emergency Physician and Chief Medical Strategy Officer
Patients want personal care but clinicians struggle with compassion fatigue.
Para is a light installation to bring awareness of compassion fatigue. Para uses real-time data collected from the hospital website. The blue side of the light represents clinicians expressing their compassion fatigue and the yellow side represents gratitude from patients, thanking clinicians for their care. This serves as a form of personal communication rather than just medical. It would be located in the waiting room at an ER where instant care is more demanding.
I reached out to an emergency physician, a nurse from the ER trauma department, and a placement nurse from the cardiology unit. By interviewing clinicians, my goal was to understand clinicians’ workflow, how they cope with compassion fatigue and if it’s even a real problem. Since this is a vulnerable topic, I felt like interviews would be the best method to have a personal conversation.
Clinicians work in a very time constraint environment. I wanted to know how they cope and de-stress in those environments. Reaching out to them didn’t seem realistic with the time limit in my project as well. I decided to go for the next best group of users. Students who deal with time constraints when juggling a bunch of projects.
I mapped clinicians' work journey focusing on their needs then I categorized them into concepts. I decided to focus on during work because that's when they need care the most and so I explored sense of accomplishment, taking a mental break and open communication.
When I looked at my constraints again... if the clinician has a hard time finding time to go to the washroom. When would they have the time to use my product? Also, how do you keep it hygienic in an unhygienic work environment?
Narrowing down my constraints, I began to look at my candle and how it provided me with instant warmth. I began to research the importance of lights on mental health. Soon after, I also learned about the power of gratitude as a way to reciprocate care and decided to explore ways to combine light + gratitude.
1. Testing prototype through roleplay with my classmates
Feedback: “Patients won’t always feel grateful in the moment so it has to be accessible at home as well to accommodate those with delayed gratitude”.
2. This was a light that would light up every time someone passes by.
Feedback: "Looks like a traffic light". Can't say I disagree so I changed the form.
3. Gathered a group of friends from various fields for a feedback session including an ER nurse. It was suppose to be a co-design session but I realized I was looking more for feedback on the existing ideas I had. We discussed environments to place it, different scenarios and directions going forward with the project.
It made sense, I had to cover the patient experience side of giving gratitude for this product to work both ways. I explored all the different scenarios of patient experiences and their behaviours. Through trying to accommodate those with delayed gratitude, I discovered NFC (Near field communication) chip and it has ultimately improved my product to accommodate all different patient experiences. People can voice complaints too! It's suppose to be a healthy communication after all.
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Made with ❤️ by Becky Zhang