Creating smoother hospital experiences for visitors

Hospitals can be unfamiliar environments for visitors. People can be in a stressful or vulnerable moment in their lives and feel uncertain at every stage in their visit. Staff at Canberra Hospital, the largest health service provider in the Canberra region, recognised this and wanted to improve their space, processes and systems to improve the visitor experience. They wanted to make it easier for visitors to approach staff and for staff to know when a visitor needs assistance.

Our approach involved a wide range of community members and we listened to many voices when creating ways to improve Hospital services. We know that a person’s interaction with health services is complex and we needed to understand what causes both positive and negative hospital experiences. We conducted exploratory interviews and in-situ observation with visitors and staff and then visualized the overall service experience with journey maps.

Together with Hospital staff, we then designed ways to improve their service delivery. We ran co-design workshops to synthesize and generate many ideas. We turned several of these into rapid and inexpensive prototypes and tested them in the Hospital environment.

The impact of our work was multi-faceted. It improved the visitor experience of health services. It grew design thinking skills and created connections between various roles, teams and programs at the Hospital. And our solutions leveraged the power of those cross-disciplinary and collaborative relationships as they developed.