Hospital - Initial project thoughts

Here are my initial thoughts on the hospital project. I welcome your feedback.

Setting

My inclination is to focus on a hospital waiting room. I think there are numerous opportunities to enhance waiting rooms as learning spaces. Given this, there are two types of waiting rooms we could focus on. Below are some thoughts on each one.

1. General practice waiting room

• Captive audience
• Good time to give preventative info (via video, posters, pamphlets, human greeters or health educators)
• People aren’t so sick that they can’t listen (in contrast to an ER waiting room, where people are in distress)
• Length of time spent in waiting room may be limited

2. ER waiting room

• Audience includes people who are sick plus their families (larger audience, including caretakers or others not there necessarily to seek any care)
• Good opportunity to educate people about other health services, such as same-day or urgent care (possibly preventing them from using the ER for certain problems)
• Waiting time tends to be longer
• There’s an opportunity to give education materials on post-operative care to the family members in the waiting room.
• Obstacles: visits are few and far between; people’s attention may be hard to get

Potential Obstacles

A major issue we must respect is patient privacy and concerns about data collection. Unless we are able to get the explicit ok from the medical director or staff that it is ok to interview or talk to patients, I think we need to stick to pure observation. Will this be sufficient data for us to draw conclusions?

Data Collection

Observation: One of the things we could observe is the workflow of the waiting room so that we can identify opportunities for education. We could observe what patients and staff are doing while:

1. Waiting in line to register and verify insurance
2. Waiting to get into exam room.
3. Waiting for doctor in the exam room
4. We could also observe what other family members who are not there to be seen are doing while they wait in the waiting room.

Surveys: IF we were allowed permission to speak to patients, maybe we could survey them on:

1. Topics they would like to learn about in the waiting room.
2. What types of devices they bring with them to the waiting room (IPods, pen and paper, cell phones, laptop).
3. Their motivation and interest in learning (perhaps some people don’t want to be learning in the waiting room – could we instead give them something to take home)

Types of Learners

• Need to know demographic of hospital district
• Provide things in multiple forms for language and presentation (e.g. some people won’t read long pieces of info)
• Content should be age and gender specific.
• Make info engaging, entertaining

Education topics:

• Universal precautions to avoid catching what’s out there (e.g., flu)
• Make info seasonal – summer: avoiding sunburn, dehydration
• If a surgical patient, what to expect, wound care, etc.
• Preventative care to avoid another visit to hospital
• Here’s a link to a video that Kaiser uses to prep patients for eye surgery before they come in for the procedure. This is just to give an idea of the type of video which could be played in a waiting room before and/or after a visit. http://www.permanente.net/homepage/kaiser/video/cataract_skin1.html
• What important info to have for M.D., e.g. family history
• Availability of social service programs and eligibility requirements (food stamps, First 5)

Deb: These are some really great initial thought. Lots of opportunities to embed learning into a space and ways that space affords learning, but remember, you'll have to get to a place where you design learning into the space. Nice topics to consider. I'm intrigued.