Immersive design-based healthcare innovation

Leonard O’Sullivan, Director RIU, School of Design, Health Research Unit, University of Limerick, talks about the Rapid Innovation Unit (RIU), an immersive design-based healthcare innovation collaboration between St John’s Hospital Limerick and the University of Limerick.

The collaboration involves a targeted programme of clinical immersion with direct staff engagement to identify, validate, and create innovations to improve patient care and service delivery.

An inherent outcome of this collaboration at a hospital level is increased creative thinking regarding identifying improvement opportunities, and then also in implementing solutions. The application of design and innovation methods through a collaboration approach with staff enables new approaches to address needs from specific patient through to system level innovations and changes.

In one example, the RIU worked with the team in the Clinical Recovery and Support Unit (CRSU) at St John’s to deliver a solution for a patient with advanced rheumatoid arthritis who spent a month in intensive care following emergency bowel surgery.

The patient, a 68-year-old woman, had difficulty gripping utensils to feed herself due to hand arthritis. Both regular cutlery and special arthritic cutlery were unsuitable for her. After meeting with the patient and the clinical team, the RIU team designed and made bespoke holders to adapt cutlery to fit her hands and the limit grip she had (right). Three versions were created to suit a knife, fork, and spoon.

The design enabled the patient to feed herself independently. In another example staff reported that a manual way of noting patients’ locations in units of the hospital using a white board was inefficient. The RIU team and staff designed a live electronic patient tracker board which detailed the unit of care in the hospital in which the patients currently were. The IT staff of the hospital then implemented the solution. This system has now been expanded to several units of the hospital wherein it has significantly increased patient flow and efficiency.

A key feature of the RIU collaboration in the hospital is the composition of multi-disciplinary innovation teams comprising both clinical experts and design innovators. St John’s Hospital seconded Siobhan Meany, Clinical Nurse Manager Perioperative Care, to the RIU as clinical Innovation Lead where she worked alongside designers. In her role Meany leads the clinical innovation strategy by way of a programme of engagement with clinical groups. In this role, Meany has led local innovation initiatives through to implemented solutions which have subsequently been shared with clinical colleagues on the national stage. One such initiative was the design and implementation of a novel constant pressure saline irrigation solution for laparoscopic surgery which was awarded the Spark Ignite award by the HSE in 2023. Since then, Meaney was awarded HSE Spark Clinical Fellow. The collaboration between the RIU and St John’s Hospital demonstrates the high impact of multi-disciplinary innovation teams in healthcare systems.

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