Today there was a story on NPR about their new emergency room built especially for seniors. The focus of the story is about the special needs of seniors as patients and how jarring the hospital environment is for an elderly patient. Hospital ERs are noisy, busy places, lacking privacy and with a lot of hard reflective surfaces. In a way, this is by design, for a hospital is designed to allow staff to treat people efficiently in a clean and hygienic setting. But it is all backwards, for it is optimized for the doctor and the staff, and not the patient. The article has very specific examples of how the aging retina perceives color differently, so the soft blue of the newly painted walls appears gray and dirty by the older patients. And the reflections coming off the shiny floor confuse and disorient the elderly.
But at Holy Cross, they are taking a different approach.
“And what’s different in this innovation is now the emergency department is saying, we’re going to change to meet the needs of the older people, not the other way around.” says Geriatrician Bill Thomas, who helped Holy Cross design the seniors ER. In other words, they are taking a user-centered design approach for the emergency room. In an interesting detail, they even had older volunteers come in and test the options they were considering for mattresses. That’s user testing. In this case, understanding user needs and pain points directly informed the design of the solution with softer surfaces, thicker mattresses, solid walls between rooms and smaller monitoring devices.
There is some resistance to this approach, as the article points out that not every hospital can afford to build a dedicated ER for seniors. But the real innovation isn’t dedicated ERs, but rather a shift in approach to hospital care in general. “Good care of older people,” Thomas says, “teaches us how to take good care of everybody.”
How many other examples are out there where the experience is designed for the wrong person, or not designed for a person at all?