Future of Palliative Care
As a component of a course project, I utilized principles of strategic foresight and the design process to understand the current state of end-of-life care at Hamilton Health Sciences, and explored how we might optimize this experience for future patients.
Conversations around dying can be uncomfortable.
This was one of the many insights that my team and I gleaned from our project on reimagining a human-centred future for end-of-life (palliative) care.
Our Process
We began by understanding the way patients, clinicians, and families were experiencing palliative care at the time, and what pain points they were each experiencing; what was working, and what was not?
Through extensive interviews and focus groups with patients and clinicians, we arrived at a core problem:
Patients wanted their wishes around death and end-of-life care to be heard.
Barriers facing various stakeholders included stigma around talking about death, emotional burden on family, and discomfort experienced by clinicians in having these conversations.
Project Outcomes
As a team, we strategized a simple solution that may improve end-of-life care experience for all parties. Our solution included having a digital device or a bulletin board that allows the patient to host information about their wishes (“I don’t want to be resuscitated” or “I care about my mobility because I have a little grandchild”). This information will be accessible to anyone the patient wishes to share it with, including family members, doctors, and nurses.
This solution can also act as a conversation starter: “Oh, I see you have wished that you want to stay mobile as long as possible. What other goals do you have around end-of-life decisions?”
My role on the team included conducting user interviews, preparing interview questions, facilitating workshops and brainstorming sessions for our group and stakeholders, and communicating with our clinical mentor and course advisors regularly. I also designed prototypes, both paper and digital, and conducted usability testing.
Our final deliverable included a presentation and a poster exhibition. I designed graphics for the poster and communicated the project outcomes clearly to the audience.