Crash Cart Redesign
Collaborative Studio Project
2013
The USer
The users in this problem are a unique crowd. All highly educated, expertly trained to respond quickly and accurately to emergencies, and understand the importance of working together to save a life. This provides an opportunity to create an updated training program that supports the updated crash cart.
Kievah Nebeker, Vance Hawley, Stella Liechty
The first studio project, in the first semester of design school was in partnership with the University of Utah Medical Center. Our semester-long assignment was to re-imagine the crash cart – the rolling sets of drawers kept around hospital floors and carry enough drugs, medicine, saline, etc. to revive a patient when they code (go into cardiac arrest).
My process began with the study of the form the crash cart might take – optimizing medicine placement, prioritizing the security of the cart, aerodynamics, storage when not in use, etc. Fairly quickly into the process, I moved away from designing the shape of the cart and more towards observing the user. The hospital staff – the nurses, doctors, CNA's. When the focus shifted to the user, so did the focus of the research and prototyping.
The goal became to allow the medical staff to be more capable of quickly utilizing their extensive BLS & ACLS training to save a patient’s lives swiftly and efficiently. This means that the function of the crash cart must support the function of the staff. So, we needed to create a functional, simple crash cart system in which technology is incorporated and kept up to date, supplies are prioritized and organized based on urgency and need, and response protocol becomes streamlined.
In Use
Below is the timeline of a code blue. As the code is happening, the pieces of the crash cart come apart and become stand-alone stations that allow the staff running the code to easily access the patient, while keeping an eye on what’s happening around the room and making communication between team members more effective.
Precedent:
Hospital and educators at the U of U Medical School show students a Code Blue drill.
