Integrated Care in Hospital: Enhancing person-centred support and new ways of communicating
Service Design | User Research | Co-design | Prototyping
With Seoul Metropolitan Dongbu Hospital
Role Service Design Director
2020
In 2020, our Human Understanding Design Centre team worked with Seoul Metropolitan Dongbu Hospital as part of our Service Design Lab practice. We worked with its integrated health and social care team, which provides holistic support to vulnerable patients at the hospital.
The support includes financial, medical, social and emotional support and other practical support patients might need. The team aimed to ensure the individual was discharged safely from the hospital to the most appropriate place and continued to receive the care and support they needed after they left the hospital.
We worked with the team to improve some of the service elements, processes and ways of working. It included working well as a multidisciplinary team and with other departments, and building stronger relationships with the community services.
Journey
First, we formed a design team, including the integrated health and social care team, other hospital members, the hospital director and people with lived experience. Key activities included:
Building Service Design capability through a series of workshops
Conducting 15 in-depth 1:1 interviews with patients, hospital staff and professionals working in the community services
Using storytelling and developing system maps to guide conversations
Making sense of all the data gathered from fieldwork and identifying key pain points and opportunities
Developing design principles for the revised service model
Co-designing new service elements, processes and communication strategy
One of the key insights was that patients were not fully aware of the support they could get from the team when a doctor or a community service referred them. So when they had the first meeting, people were not ready to express their needs.
We designed a friendly and easy-to-understand introduction about the team and the holistic support available so that people feel comfortable asking for help. We also re-designed how the team had conversations with the patients, as the meetings between professionals and patients often can become a box-ticking exercise.
Outcome & Impact
A new brand and name
An intuitive and easy-to-understand ‘first guide’ about the role of the team, different kinds of support available
‘Story video’ helps people better understand what they can expect from the support and what would be different in their life based on the real stories
‘Conversation cards’ help people actively express how they feel and what kind of help they need. We made visually engaging cards for those who can’t read well. It also encouraged the staff to have person-centred conversations based on people’s needs, aspirations and strengths.
‘Seoul Care Zone’, a space and process that make easy, quick access for anyone to get the help they need
Above all, we fostered better practice to bring a patient-centred approach to their service delivery.
Visual materials and animation designed with Achiul Studio and Hiplay
“Being part of the service design lab reminded me of why I chose my social care carer. I’ve been frustrated with the workload and how things are in this system. Despite the challenges, I reminded myself that I should always listen to patients and find a way forward with them.”
The importance of learning and reflection in service delivery
Creating time for reflection was important not just to improve the service iteratively for the users but also to give frontline practitioners a breath of fresh air, which is often missing in their current roles.
Also, sometimes when you speak to them, it’s the basic things that they want to be solved, but they don’t know where to ask for help. Service Design lab meetings were regular reflective spaces where people talked about these things too.