The Big IDea!

Impact

In busy ward and clinic environments, where scrubs are worn and staff are coming and going, it can be difficult for staff to know who is who. 70% of staff surveyed before the redesign said it was difficult or very difficult to identify co-workers. For patient care, it is essential that staff members can identify and communicate with each other with ease. This project aims to improve team communication and aid easier identification of ward staff through the redesign of the ID badge. 

• 93% of staff concluded that the new Big ID badge made it easy to identify someone’s role and specialty at a glance. 
• 83% said it was an improvement on the current ID badge, reducing the need for clinical staff to have to ask each other what their role is.

At an initial trial stage whilst handing out the Big IDea badges to doctors in the Emergency Department we were asked by multiple doctors and nurses ‘When will we get ours?’.

Challenge

For team communications, it is important that staff know who is a nurse, a doctor or social worker and so on. They also need to know what they specialise in; Cardiology, Dermatology or a Lung Surgeon for example. Scrubs and mask wearing have become the norm making it particularly hard to tell who is who. The existing ID badge doesn’t show clinical specialty and is too small to read. The aim was to enable quick and easy identification of ward staff to support team communication.

Process

A team of NCAD masters students initially looked at this challenge as part of the 5 day Design Week at the Mater in 2019. Since then, the Mater designers have evolved the concepts. There were a number of constraints that the design had to respond to. For example:

• We needed to create a design that would be optimally visible in context while fitting in with how clinicians naturally wear their current ID badges
• The design system had to allow for frequent rotations as junior doctors move between specialties up to four times a year and they cant change the ID badge each time. Therefore the solution had to be stand alone. 

The design team explored options for a new badge design looking at colour, size and legibility. Larger font and colour coding by occupation group was needed, the first sample prototype emerged. This was shown as a cardboard cut-out to any staff encountered to get their opinion on whether it would instantly identify occupations, their grade and specialty.  Changes were made and finally a high-fidelity prototype emerged from this co-design process. Material for the new badge was considered, and a hard plastic material was chosen for its durability. The new badges were trialled on three groups in the hospital and the feedback was very positive.

Output

Formal evaluation of the pilot showed that the new badge was a big success with 93% of staff saying that the badge has made a big difference in identifying staff easily and at a distance. Hospital executives have approved the badge to be rolled out to many ward staff groups and this is in progress.