Design Thinking for Doctors and Nurses
“It allows for the creative, multidisciplinary thinking around solving the issue.”
At Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, where Dr. Bon Ku serves as director of the Jefferson Health Design Lab, medical students, nurses, doctors
and other hospital personnel are given the freedom to design, manufacture and prototype their ideas, which they can then present back to the hospital.
The orange vest became routine part of emergency care at our hospital earlier this year,
and the trauma team reports it has helped clarify who’s in charge and strengthened communication among members.
A 2016 report that looked at ways in which a health system can implement design thinking identified three principles behind the approach: empathy for the
user, in this case a patient, doctor or other health care provider; the involvement of an interdisciplinary team; and rapid prototyping of the idea.
“Design thinking is useful for when we need a paradigm shift, for instance when something is fundamentally broken about a service,” said Thomas Fisher, one of the authors of the report
and the director of the Minnesota Design Center at the University of Minnesota.
It’s a simple yet effective innovation created by a nurse after a hectic gunshot trauma simulation, in which a
huddle of highly stressed emergency room staff members spoke over one another and there were no clear roles.
In recent years, a growing number of health care workers have been stepping up to create innovations by applying “design thinking” – a human-centered approach to innovation
that was originally developed in the business world to create new products.