Emergency medical equipment storage: benefits of visual cues tested in field and simulated settings

Designing a First Responders’ Emergency Response Kit for Motor-Vehicle Collisions

Fast, effective, and accurate emergency medical treatment can save lives. Quick access to the specific equipment that emergency medical personnel need facilitates more efficacious treatment during emergencies. This project focuses on designing an improved emergency response kit for medical first responders. The kit currently in use has no organizational standard for the way the medical items it contains are placed inside. With a user-centered method, we designed a kit that better fits first responders’ requirements and found that the kit – a backpack and a vest – is both easier to use and carry, based on emergency care priorities.

Understanding the Heterogeneity of Labor and Delivery Units: Using Design Thinking Methodology to Assess Environmental Factors that Contribute to Safety in Childbirth

OBJECTIVE

There is limited research exploring the relationship between design and patient safety outcomes, especially in maternal and neonatal care. We employed design thinking methodology to understand how the design of labor and delivery units impacts safety and identified spaces and systems where improvements are needed.

STUDY DESIGN

Site visits were conducted at 10 labor and delivery units in California. A multidisciplinary team collected data through observations, measurements, and clinician interviews. In parallel, research was conducted regarding current standards and codes for building new hospitals.

RESULTS

Designs of labor and delivery units are heterogeneous, lacking in consistency regarding environmental factors that may impact safety and outcomes. Building codes do not take into consideration workflow, human factors, and patient and clinician experience. Attitude of hospital staff may contribute to improving safety through design. Three areas in need of improvement and actionable through design emerged: (1) blood availability for hemorrhage management, (2) appropriate space for neonatal resuscitation, and (3) restocking and organization methods of equipment and supplies.

CONCLUSION

Design thinking could be implemented at various stages of health care facility building projects and during retrofits of existing units. Through this approach, we may be able to improve hospital systems and environmental factors.

Ergonomic design of new paramedic response bags

A two phase project is described for redesigning and evaluating paramedic response bags, one of the key pieces of equipment used by emergency medical services. Adopting a user-centred approach, Phase I involved first educating active service paramedics about ergonomic principles, and then collaborating with them to conceptualise a new type of response bag, based on separate colour coded kits, each containing related equipment items. Phase II describes a formal evaluation study, involving simulated procedures with a patient mannequin and active service paramedics in a real ambulance. Results indicated subjective preferences for the new bags, where 62% of the paramedics believed it was easier to find equipment in the new bag and 65% preferred the new bags overall. No detrimental effects were attributed to the transition to the new bag. Also discussed are the advantages of the participatory design approach, as well as design guidelines and implications for paramedic operations.

Prospective Memory in Complex Sociotechnical Systems

An important cognitive function is the ability to remember to execute future tasks, a capability known as prospective memory (PM). Workers in complex sociotechnical systems such as healthcare and aviation face many PM challenges and forgetting tasks can have severe consequences. Although researchers have made progress in understanding how individuals remember future tasks, system-level support for PM has seldom been addressed. In the present paper, we briefly review PM research in healthcare and aviation, focusing on naturalistic studies using expert workers, and we present the concept of distributed prospective memory, which incorporates the interaction between the environment and the individual when future tasks must be remembered. PM in sociotechnical settings is a complex process involving human and nonhuman agents. Therefore, a systems approach is needed to fully understand PM processes, thus supporting workers and eventually minimizing errors and increasing safety.