Supporting the workflow of nurses at the ICU

Abstract

The intensive care is a complex environment where nurses have to deal with more than 500 tasks a day, an administrative burden and an information overspill coming from a multitude of IT systems and colleagues. On top of that, a high rate of alarms is false and messages are not always relevant. These stressors have a large impact on patient safety and work satisfaction. In literature, multiple solutions are proposed to improve this situation. However, these research outcomes are not consistently implemented in the field, the solutions found are not generally accepted due to current hospital cultures and the usability of implemented solutions is often insufficient.

This project started with the assignment to design a dashboard for ICU nurses that would improve patient safety and work satisfaction. To reach that goal, a contextual research, based on contextmapping, was done, in which seven ICU nurses were interviewed about their workflow and information management. There, it came forward that improving effectiveness and efficiency, could improve work satisfaction and patient safety. To achieve this, collaboration and the feeling of having control of the situation had to be improved. This led to the design goal “Design a dashboard that increases the feeling of control and collaboration by showing timely and relevant information.”

To come to a design that fits the ICU environment, the appearance and interaction style was based on the general characteristics of an ICU nurse. The content of the dashboard was based on a co-creation session with ICU nurses, which also provided structure to the interface. To provide alert fatigue to occur, an alert philosophy was formulated that gives guidance to prioritizing the alerts and to visualizing the types of notifications.

This design was tested with six ICU nurses, with the aim to get insight in their opinions about the system and to formulate recommendations for further development. The results of this test show, that the nurses think this system is intuitive, easy to learn and has future potential to improve information provision and patient safety.

However, it has to further developed to conclude this with more certainty. For example, the interface of the dashboard has to be evaluated when it is used next to the current registration software, so it can be concluded whether the current design does justice to the dashboard’s main functionalities. Next to that, it is recommended to look into supporting communication in multidisciplinary teams by means of this ICU Dashboard.

It could be concluded that this project has provided a good foundation to reach the goal of New Compliance. It provided insight in the ICU context and proposed a design, which seems to be able to support the ICU nurses’ workflow. Not only is it a tool that helps nurses to locate specific information more quickly, it also gives insight in the activities of team members so that collaboration can run more smoothly. In short, the ICU Dashboard is a good start to improve patient safety and work satisfaction.