The Design Council invited The Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre to join the project at an early stage.
The Centre has a strong track record of working with industry and service providers to generate innovative ideas and products. Workplace design and patient safety are its priority areas, making it a natural fit for the aims of the Design Bugs Out project.
Senior Research Associates Sally Halls and Jonathan West, and Research Associate Grace Davey were part of the initial hospital research team, helping to research, brainstorm and then draft the initial briefs, as well as taking on a key part of the final project, creating six products, termed ‘quick wins’ — small in size but big in impact.
Everyday equipment for doctors and nurses
In this short film, the Helen Hamlyn Centre team discuss the six prototypes they developed for the Design Bugs Out project.
The designers' insights
‘Through the time that we spent in the hospitals, it became so clearly evident that nearly all of the equipment hadn’t been designed with cleaning in mind,’ says Davey. ‘There were lots of nooks and crannies, and gaps that the nurses can’t get into. We found in some wards that nurses were actually using toothbrushes to try and clean things effectively.’ The team also observed that the alcohol based wipes used for cleaning almost everything were actually damaging the surface of equipment, which generally hadn’t been designed for such harsh cleaning materials or regimes.
Halls adds: ‘Often there’s a real issue to do with whose responsibility it is for cleaning the equipment (cleaners usually only clean the hospital structure — walls and flooring — and nurses have to clean the equipment), and it means that whoever does it, doesn’t have very much time. So if the nurses have to do it when they have five minutes to spare, it means that everything has to be cleanable in two seconds flat with these pre-prepared wet wipes. It’s about designing for current cleaning practices.’
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