INTRODUCTION
Information overload is always a problem for patients at hospitals, especially as medical diagnoses, treatments, and follow up care become more complicated. Having to deal with information is hard enough when you're the patient, but perhaps a tougher situation is when the patient is a young child and you're their parent or caregiver.
The aim of this project is to study both the emotional journey of parents with children at Pittsburgh Children's Hospital as well as the current methods for information delivery, and develop an enhanced system or service that will hopefully improve the current methods of family education.
PROCESS
collection of process documentation (click on image to see full size)
I will be talking to families in the Intermediary Care Unit at Pittsburgh Children's Hospital. Just opened in October 2007, this unit houses a maximum of 23 children from various medical backgrounds, as these children usually come directly from any of the intensive care units at the hospital.
Because of some holdups with my IRB applications, I have just begun to talk to families at the hospital. For the first four months, I did a lot of background research (on the hospital, as well as different methods of information delivery), and interviewed four staff members working in different departments at the hospital. From this I developed models of the family and patient flow, as well as the information flow for the parents as seen through the eyes of the staff. I have also developed four different research activities that I will be doing with the families. Please see my thesis project poster (see link on right) for more details!
PRESENTATIONS
Thesis Project Videosketch