Design for better hand hygiene minimises the spread of disease.
The project was about reducing the spread of the winter vomiting bug. An important part is good hand hygiene, in particular the use of hand sanitizer. Within the project it was observed that the stations with hand sanitizer were difficult to spot, put in the wrong places and had different designs.
The orthopaedic clinic at the Central Hospital in Karlstad was used as pilot study to use service design within the County Council of Värmland and it was also Experio Lab’s first project where all steps of the service design process were applied. ‘To do an Albin’ became a saying at the orthopaedic clinic and meant that you included patients in the development work. The project was conducted in 2012 in collaboration with Innovationssluss Vivan, the Department of Communicable Disease Control, the orthopaedic clinic and Landstingsfastigheter.
The goal of the project was to make the hand sanitizer stations more visible and more easily accessible to healthcare staff, patients and visitors with the help of design.
A number of service design methods were used in the project: the staff were shadowed, patients and staff were interviewed and around 30 doctors were invited to a creative workshop. A model of the clinic was also created to allow healthcare staff to decide where the hand sanitizer stations should be placed based on the way they moved and worked in the clinic.
Visible hand sanitizer stations have now been strategically placed in the orthopaedic clinic and in all patient rooms and staff rooms at the Patient Hotel at the Central Hospital in Karlstad.
The use of hand sanitizer has increased among both healthcare staff and patients, which has led to reduced spread of disease, reduced costs and reduced suffering among the patients.
Presentation 1
Presentation 2 (in Swedish)
Report (in Swedish)
