Week 2 – Client Visit and Brainstorming

We had our brainstorm everyday so that we could iterate on our thoughts and tackle our problem space.
We had read research papers, saw videos, gathered similar projects from the past and worked to pitch our design ideas to the faculty.
We did not limit our ideas to tech constraints so that we can be comfortable brainstorming.
Week 2 also had us develop our composition box.

The team kicked off the design and conceptualization process by creating the composition box. This helped us understand parts of the problem and we could brainstorm on what we should focus on the high level.

We had multiple design ideas to present to our advisor’s. We had thought of training modules, or story based design, live action 360 degree videos, perspective taking, meaningful mini games that could help understand empathy.

Our problem space was very deep until this point which was unknown to the team. All the design was lacking real experience of understanding the work situation of nurses and hence we setup client visits.

Hospital Visit
We seperated ourselves into two batches as we could space ourselves with enough time to think about how we could iterate on design.

We got to shadow nurses for two hours and understand their work practices especially during shift changes. In the end of the week, the team came together to develop an affinity map.

Our clients wanted us to develop empathy through VR, but through building the affinity map we understood that nurses do not lack empathy.
We got key insights on how nurses work and a key takeaway is designing for empathy is harder than our initial thought process and brainstorming.
Majority of our brainstorming had to be revised.

By the end of week we finished our affinity map and had multiple takeaways.

Communication(Current communication, empathy, communication skill)

1. The current method of building empathy for the patient is face-to-face shift reports.The report is based on hand-writing notes which not only include patient’s treatment and health condition but also more personal and emotional details, which is actually how empathy comes from. Empathy comes from understanding, which helps nurses to treat and care for the patient as a real human being.
2. Good communication skills : Nurses who are more engaging towards the patients seem to be more empathetic than the nurses who only do their job.
3. Nurses are actually a ‘high-score group’: In terms of smiling,caring as well as empathy, nurses do better than average people in our daily life. The key may not on the people but the situation, or how they think towards their situation.
4. This may relate to the personality of different nurses.Some nurses do not talk gently with the patients, but some nurses always have an energetic attitude toward patients. Some are outgoing, some are quiet and modest.

Patient

1.Being a patient means facing challenges physically, mentally, and emotionally.The living condition in hospital is apparently not as comfortable as at home. A patient usually needs to share a room with another patient and sometimes got influenced when sleeping. Besides, most of the time they are staying alone and could do nothing lying on the bed. And easy to be nervous and panic because of various suffering from illness and treatment.

2.Going to a hospital is already an unpleasant experience, including physically experiencing pain and being touched by strangers, and mentally conscious about being ill and needs treatment, patients are naturally seeking more comforts and supports than usual. Emotionally, patient-nurse relationship is not an equal relationship. Patients are naturally being anxious, worried, and helpless.

3.Patient’s communication is heavily relied on whether the patient has enough support besides hospital, for example, whether having support from family, whether familiar with medical treatment, and whether growing up as a respectful person and has a nice personality. 

Nurse’s Motivation

1.The nurse’s work is busy and requires multi-task management.
Nurses need to take care of 4-6 patients at the same time and managing different treatment, checking and caring works. Also, they are the connection between doctors and patient and their families.
2. Empathy does exist to some extent, but nurses are lack motivation to devote extra effort to patients especially on emotional/mental care.
Most of the nurses already show a nice and caring attitude towards their patients and really engaged in when doing their job. But they would rather chat with colleagues instead of staying with the patient when they have some free time. And they are not fully motivated to devote their emotional care to every patient they deal with.
3.Interest in job: Nurses who are liking the job and are motivated to perform execute tasks well.
4.Comfort zone effect: Getting close to things we are familiar with other than unfamiliar is human nature. So if have choice, nurse may tend to back to their trained work or chat with colleges other than try to communicate  patient who they just get known few hours ago.
5.Differences in age(generation, stage of life), life experience, vocabulary/ terminology are the natural barriers for patients and nurses to understand each other. Therefore, it is hard for them to build a deep connection.
6.Nurse-patient relationships are temporary, most of them are lasting less for 12 hours. Therefore it is lack of motivation for nurses to invest into a patient.

System(Routine, priority, rewards):

1. Conflict between systematism and humanize:  In a big network like AHN, everything is following the procedure, people will get numb to the endless procedures. However, things like caring people need to jump out of the box of procedures, to treat everyone specially, not systematically.
2. Lost the war of priority: Nurse both need to ensure physical support(help take medicine, connect to doctors) and mental support. The former is ‘mandatory’ with visible results while the latter is more ‘invisible’. When these two responsibilities share the same time and energy, caring is not and shouldn’t be the high priority .
3. Empathy is appreciated but not obligated to the nurse’s work. The nurse’s top priority is to assist doctor and to provide treatment for patients, empathy and emotional intelligence is considered secondary tasks both by themselves, by hospital administration, and by nursing college programs. 
4. Nurses’ empathy is not rewarded enough by the system. They are mostly being empathy for self-realization and personal belief. Or, not being empathetic enough will not be punished.