I like nurses. They do Good (capital G)
I spent a fair amount of time around nurses when my first son was born, and walked away with the impression that they are the glue of our medical system.
Yet for some reason it seems that there isn’t a whole lot of innovation (i hate that word) in making nurses jobs easier. Maybe I see it wrong, but most of the medical startups seem to be focusing on imaging or pharmaceuticals, not solutions to improve a nurses ability to care for their patients.
Whether or not that’s actually true is immaterial. I thought it was true, got myself worked up, signed up for an account on AllNurses.com, and asked:
I’m curious to know what are the most laborious, difficult, tedious, etc. procedures or duties that you have to perform on a regular basis.
I was inundated with opinions, read each one, and filtered the results into a word cloud. The consensus? Anything involving tubes/oral/anal ranked high on the “not like to do list”.
A mind-blowing insight? Perhaps not (i certainly wouldn’t have guessed it, and I definitely didn’t know what a Dobhoff Tube was), but that isn’t the point.
The point is that, almost by definition, people who’s profession is Doing Good are going to be passionate about it. That passion translates into an eagerness to talk about their work.
As product designers + engineers, I think we have a responsibility to tap that eagerness and do some good of our own.
And if any of you nurses want to share some more… please do!
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Article by chris loughnane
Chris is Design Engineer + Sustainability Advocate at a Boston area design consultancy and has written 127 sweet posts for the Product Development Notebook.
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