What are the pressures on nurses and how are medical devices used in real medical settings?
Nurses have extremely challenging jobs, both mentally and physically. To minimise the opportunities for problems occurring, medical devices need to be designed to support the way nurses actually work. For that to occur a deep understanding of this context is needed. The aim of this project is to understand the pressures on nurses in real situations exploring issues such as how they use devices, how they deal with distractions and recover from mistakes, how they interact with colleagues over device use, and so on. We will do this using a mixture of observational studies in natural medical settings complemented by interviews to establish how nurses think about the operation of devices and determine the kinds of critical incidents that nurses need to deal with. We will build a deep understanding of the context of various hospital environments providing the basis for work on other CHI+MED projects to ensure devices can be designed to support the work of nurses as seamlessly as possible.
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CHI+MED publications
Keywords: Understanding context, situated study, hospitals.
Key people: Dominic Furniss, Astrid Mayer, Ann Blandford