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The Liaison Project- Design Challenge

Design Challenge conducted by Hackworks

Group Members

David Buckley

Lucas Luoma-Uhliq

Jordan Lum

My Role

  • Undertook secondary research to help learn about the problem space

  • Conducted stakeholder interviews to gain further insight into potential solutions and to explore the validity of our chosen solution

  • Assisted in the creation of two design artefacts to explore the as-is scenario for our chosen problem, and our imagined to-be scenario including our solution

  • Created a pitch presentation to submit for the design challenge

Project Overview

"How might we improve the hospital experience for shelter clients so
that they can feel cared for and as safe as possible when they suffer
from illness or injury?"

Wilfred Laurier ran a design challenge through Hackworks that aimed to tackle the issue of homelessness in Toronto. Teams of 1-5 students were given just 6 weeks to explore the problem space of homelessness in Canada, and to devise an innovative solution, backed by research, that would help improve the issue. 

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After exploring the resources provided, and conducting our own secondary research, my team decided to explore the issues surrounding hospital administration and discharge of homeless patients, particularly including the communication channels between shelters and hospitals. We then conducted our own primary research, recruiting and interviewing six shelter subject matter experts. The insight from our research led to our proposed solution, a new role of Hospital-Shelter Liaisons that would integrate within hospitals and their existing outreach programs to better advocate and support homeless patients during triage, and improve communication with shelters during discharge.

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Research and Ideation

Recruiting and Interviewing key stakeholders

Once we had established our specific problem space through secondary research, we identified two research questions we would use to guide our interview study.

 

To begin out interview study we reached out to several shelters and organisations across Toronto and were able to recruit six subject matter experts to interview. We conducted these interviews in a semi-structured format, with two members of the team present, one leading the interview and one notetaking.

​How do shelters support clients when clients need health care? What issues emerge between shelters and health care services when attempting to care for clients?


What specific processes/systems do shelters employ when admitting, tracking, and discharging clients? How do these processes/systems intersect with health care
services?

Our proposed solution

Our Design Guidelines

As a group we synthesised our results, and came away with three key findings. We used these findings to guide the ideation for our solution. Bearing in mind some of the discussions we had with our interview participants about feasibility, we used these findings to guide the direction of our proposed solution.

1. Advocacy within the hospital is really important to ensure they can get the appropriate treatment and care.
2. People suffering from homelessness are often reluctant to seek care because of poor experiences they’ve had in the ER and in hospitals.
3. Nurses, Doctors and discharge teams are too busy to adequately plan and connect with a patient around the needs of their care post discharge.

As-Is Model

Using the information we gathered from our interviews, we created an As-Is Journey map, to help illustrate the current state of our problem space and to explore the pain points our solution would tackle.

 

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As-Is HDC.png

To-Be Model

Building on this, we also created a To-Be journey map, that models how the journey would improve using 

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To-Be HDC.png

Evaluation

Project Challenges

  • The tight timeline for this project led to a rushed research phase. We would have preferred to spend much longer conducting both our own secondary research, and also our primary research. 

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  • We were unable to gain any responsible access to individuals themselves who were dealing, or had historically dealt with homelessness themselves.

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  • We had to limit our scope to just one set of stakeholders due to time, stakeholders such as social workers and hospital staff are clearly missing from the research

Taking the project further

  • Conducting further research would be imperative, not only conducting more interviews, but structuring our research process more formally. 

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  • Some development of personas would benefit this project

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  • Field research would also be crucial in understanding the specific challenges needed to be tackled

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  • Once more research has been conducted, evaluating our refined solution would be the next step. This could be done with more interviews directed towards evaluation, potentially including preference testing

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