I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a colleague of mine, Tine Park, who’s just returned from facilitating a workshop on hospital innovation in Chicago at EPIC 2009, an international conference on the application of ethnography and human-centred design in industry.

At Designit, we’ve been working at a Danish hospital with service innovation for a year now. And Designit’s EPIC workshop indicated that one challenge is universal for hospitals: humanising healthcare.

Participants of the workshop – among others healthcare professionals and decision-makers from the public and private healthcare sector in the U.S. – said there was a need to: 1) improve communication between staff and patients so that that patient’s understand their situation and role, 2) make people feel welcome and safe 3) meet the needs of users as individuals.

In other words, they expressed a need for increased focus on the person. The individual. Ensuring the system fits the user – and not the other way round. Create real solutions for real people – that is also the need identified at the workshop and most certainly by our fieldwork in at Odense University Hospital in Denmark.

So how do you do this? Well, it’s important to say that this doesn’t have to cost the earth. As an innovator / design thinker, you need to show respect for the complexity of hospitals and the constraints. You must accept hospitals’ evidence-based culture – then identify what to test and create the right test change conditions. Many small, incremental innovations can, when gathered, have a big impact. It’s not about changing everything overnight, but slowly starting a new mindset and a movement.

Another crucial point is commitment. As a decision-maker at a hospital, you need to ask yourself: are you really committed to this change process? Will you support it throughout the organisation – even when you meet opposition?

Interesting to see that the need for humanisation in the healthcare sector is more widespread than we’d thought. Hospitals are most definitely not immune to change, you just need to understand the dynamics and design your innovation process accordingly.

Just some thoughts from the field…