Design for Patient Safety

I've only just come upon an interesting report co-commissioned by the Design Council and the Department of Health entitled Design for Patient Safety (launched February 2004).

It contains plenty of messages which are not new ("too many helthcare solutions have been designed based upon a paucity of knowledge of the system into which they will be placed or the needs of the people who will use them" and so on) but which unfortunately continue to be true.

I like the way the text explicitly ranges across both medical devices and information systems. While the former have become more computerised, the latter have increasingly become clinical (and therefore safety-critical) rather than purely administrative. In other words, medical devices and information systems are converging. However, the institutional division in healthcare between 'computing' and 'medical devices' has continued, and does not help the safety agenda for either staff or patients.

The report's point that design for safety will only be taken on board - and perhaps used as a competitive edge - by healthcare systems providers when the market is subject to strict usability criteria, and when the NHS uses its collective purchasing power to push for usable designs, is well made. The splintered market we've had to date has only served to put all the power into the hands of niche providers who then seem to hold individual Trusts by the short 'n' curlies.

The words 'usability' and 'ease of use' are mentioned (once or twice each??), but I can't seem to find any reference in the report to user-centered design, or to accepted industry process standards, such as ISO 13407 (Human-centred design processes for interactive systems). And the report speaks of 'developing criteria for usability' - in packaging, information, equipment - but makes no reference to the existence of considerable work in this area, such as in information design for pharmaceutical packaging. Is this deliberate? Or a consequence of the various sub-professions in experience design not talking to each other?

Unless this industry starts to standardise what it is promoting and what it calls things, its message will continue to be confused and lack impact. Information design, interaction design, technical communication, interface design, experience design, product design, service design, ergonomics (the report was largely written by ergonomists I believe)....- we are all dealing with the same material and the same issues and perhaps need to start talking the same language, especially to clients.

And unless we as an industy start to build on what we already know, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel, we're going to waste an awful lot of time and money.

I suspect this will only happen when we all start talking to each other instead of amongst ourselves.

Right now, though, there just seem to be too many similar but different hymn sheets.