Student team: Ashleen Nee (Service Designer), Linda Klotzbach (Service Designer), YuYu Sun (Interaction Designer)

University: National College of Art and Design

Country: Ireland

The Context

Major trauma, which can result in prolonged disability or death, presents a complex challenge. Although most acute hospitals in Ireland accept trauma cases, regardless of their expertise, patients often require transfer to another hospital for definitive care.

Unfortunately, this process can lead to delays in decision-making and treatment, resulting in poorer outcomes and avoidable disability or death.

The Service

To address these issues, our interdisciplinary design team collaborated with a prominent Irish hospital to enhance Major Trauma Care nationwide. Our design concept centres around supporting Trauma Bays, dedicated spaces for live-saving care. By alleviating stress and pressure, our design allows pre-hospital and hospital trauma staff to focus on the major trauma at hand. We aimed to challenge existing technology, optimise physical space, and leverage staff expertise.

Process Overview

Through ethnographic research and interviews with pre-hospital care teams, emergency staff, paramedics, nurses, and doctors, we gained valuable insights into their processes. By mapping the patient journey, we identified critical and time-consuming points in the trauma care process; including the emergency call, scene care, ED handoff, and trauma team actions. Using these insights, we focused on improving information pathways and enhancing communication before trauma patients arrive at the ED.

Field visits to the hospital allowed us to test our concepts and receive iterative feedback
from staff. Together, we developed a proposed solution that saves time and equips the entire team for more effective life-saving work.

The Outcome

Our solution comprises 3 elements:

1. A Smart Whiteboard integrated into the hospital‘s bleep system provides live transcription of essential patient information, reducing pressure on paramedics and allowing emergency nurses to access critical data during pre-alert moments.
2. A renewed Space Set Up within the Trauma Bay optimises staff placement, ensuring better access to patients and minimises confusion during the team’s arrival.
3. A 360-degree viewable Digital Screen Aid offers the trauma team vital signs, clinical injury photos, and emergency guidance, regardless of their location around the patient. This visual accessibility eliminates the reliance on verbal communication for sharing critical information.

The Impact

Our proposed solution gives staff their energy and focus back. We addressed the significant time wasted in rewriting handover information by enhancing the ASHICE communication method. This adaptation, which is handwriting-free, is predicted to save an average of 10 minutes per major trauma case.

As this hospital is on a journey towards becoming the major trauma centre for the central trauma network in Ireland, this time saving has a huge impact on the quality and delivery of patient care.

Based on our final design concepts and prototypes, the hospital took the concept further, which led to a funding for implementation through HSE Spark Innovation, acknowledging the potential impact of Save Time, Save Lives.