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Health Care System Analysis

Decent Essays

The salient aim of the health care system is to provide patients with superlative care and medical treatment. However, it has been established that healthcare workers often have to subsist with poorly designed equipment, which hinders their ability to provide optimum care for patients and often leads to life threatening medical errors (West et al. 2014). To combat this problem, the design team, West et al., employed an interdisciplinary, evidence based approach to “Design out Medical Error” (DOME) from health care systems. One of the areas arising from this tasks included redesigning five high risk processes defined by hospital staff and patients. The advantage of addressing multiple processes at once, is that an integrated solution could …show more content…

Gradually, the salient ideas emerged and they were continually refined until the concept of the “CareCentre” was proposed, which addressed the high risk processes of hand hygiene and prevention of infection.

At this time, the design team interviewed over 100 healthcare workers to devise and implement the first prototype. Although the design was successful at this stage, it underwent three further rounds of feedback which continued to refine the “CareCentre” design. The testing stage was then implemented by asking nurses to perform common clinical tasks in a simulated ward environment. Those with access to the “CareCentre” utilised the WHO moments of hand hygiene more often and more correctly used gloves and aprons, than those without.

Our evaluation
From this case study, we have extracted relevant aspects to implement in our design process and evaluated their usefulness in assisting with creating a suitable final solution. For example, the interdisciplinary approach used by West et al. (2014), evidently produced an all encompassing final design, by allow the various team members to lead the discussion in the areas where their skills were relevant. We hope to incorporate this into our method to gain the fresh perspectives of people from other areas of expertise which may have been overlooked by a narrow focus. As such, we believe this approach could be used in our design, by

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