Another hectic week for Team O!

We have now had our second reference group meeting – “decision of the clinical needs”. Four hours to go from ten needs to four! It was an exciting meeting, talking to the doctors and midwifes getting their input. It was an interesting discussion, with each person adding to it by giving their personal insight to the problems and needs.

The four needs that we will be moving forward with are:

1. Optimizing the usage of the operation unit
2. Improving the DRG-coding at the clinic
3. Minimizing the information gap between health personnel and patients
4. Decrease environmental impact at the hospital by creating good storage solutions 
   

   Team O – happy after a succesfull reference group meeting.

We are now in the stage of finding master thesis students to take on these projects, the end of the week was spent sending out ads to get students interested in joining us in the improvement work. If you want to read more about our projects visit: http://ctmh.se/en/student-projects/

We are also moving forward with our commercial needs, spending most of thursday deep diving into the different needs and looking into gaps in our need formulations. Speed validation is getting easier!

“It’s been a hard days work” – our commercial needs being sorted into groups.

Every hard work needs a celebration (kudos to Gustav, the team psychologist, for reminding us of this) – which is why we set a date for celebrating the work and preparation for reference group meeting 2 – “decision of the clinical needs”. We celebrated by having a dinner together and playing guitar hero. Some (john) were better at it than others.

//Désirée for Team Obstetrics

During the last week we have been working intensively with the local needs that are specific to the clinic. With the help of our clinical supervisor and our clinical mentor we filtered down our long list to ten needs which can have a high impact for the clinic if addressed. To get a broad and diverse input to these needs we distributed detailed descriptions of these needs and then discussed them individually with several midwifes and doctors. We put so much time on this, because next week we will, together with the clinic, choose three to four needs, to which we will recruit students to work on solution as their Master’s Thesis project.

Lunch break walk in the snow behind the hospital.

But the week has not only been about filtering needs, but also about learning and personal development. On Monday we had our first individual sessions with our psychologist. The content of these sessions is as individual as it is secret, but I believe we all worked on developing personal strategies to improve some aspect of our work in the fellowship team.  Furthermore we had a workshop together with the other team, in which we discussed how to work with our commercial needs. We discussed specific needs as well as strategies how to evaluate these needs and in the end filter down to only a handful. Having more than 200 commercial needs, filtering down will be a challenge that we are ready to meet in the upcoming weeks. On Friday we had a lecture on the reimbursement system for medical products in Sweden, knowledge that will come in handy when deciding which needs are worth pursuing.

We also started thinking about practical aspects of the work that is ahead of us and looked at an office and prototyping workshop space which we could use once we have decided which of the commercial needs is the chosen on. At least some of us are looking forward to getting their hands dirty in prototyping.

Will this be the table where we do our prototyping?

Fritzi // Team Obstetrics

It’s been a hectic week for team Obstetrics. We have had two processes going on at the same time; having our first business mentor meeting and preparing for our second, most important, reference group meeting.

A big help on the way was the EIT-health meeting that John and Fritzi participated in in Barcelona. They came home with lots of advice that has already helped us, but also made our work more creative and fun, with the props that we have incorporated in our work [to learn more see our last blog post]. Even though it has been a tough week with several deadlines we have handled it well and the collaboration in the group has gone great. Everyone has worked hard, shared ideas and been supportive of each other.

The biggest challenge this week has been going down from a big amount of local needs for the clinic, to the ten that we are going to present on our reference group meeting. It has been difficult and we had to kill several darlings and also take a few steps back to see the whole picture. It has also been very educational to truly try and focus on needs and not solutions (so that we in the end solve what really is the issue).  

It was also a lot of fun to meet our business mentors! They had a lot of useful input that we will take with us to the next phase.

We have also continued with our “Friday Fun” – activities. It is a way to make sure that the collaboration in the group continues being good and that we have fun with each other. This time we did “action painting” which had a great side effect of making our (new) room more colorful.

Action painting for “Friday Fun”

The upcoming week we will be preparing even more for the reference group meeting and challenge the needs that we have.

//Désirée (doctor) for team Obstetrics

Hi,

On last Friday our Swedish team went to meet the three Barcelona teams in Barcelona to ask them questions since they just graduated the CIF-program. They gave us a lot of interesting recommendations.

Since I´m very interested in product development and innovation these were the most interesting things they told us:

*Have a hat to give a person if he/ she was being too negative during a group discussion.

*Give a person that interrupts others a chicken or just say the word chicken.

*During brainstorming you could first say everyone needs to stay positive and wear positive props. ( like party hats. ) After the positive session you could decide the whole group should be “negative” wearing angry hats trying to find why this ideas won’t work.

So coming back from Barcelona this week we were super inspired and directly went to the store and bought:
1. A soft pig to throw at the person being negative.

2. A hat with some black on it for when the group should be critical.

3. A Hawaii flower bracelet to give to one when he/she did something positive

4. An “walking” balloon in the shape of a panda ? that you could get if you are positive.

We have now worked with picking out 40 local needs and 10 commercial ones and using these tricks and it worked super good. I think it could have been one of my most effective idé validation meeting ever, thanks to the props and advice we got in Barcelona! 

One advice we also got and are using is to ask our self:
“does this really mater in 1 month?” To not have long arguments over too small topics.

During the Saturday in Barcelona we had some time of before going to the airport in the evening so we walked around and visit the “Sagrada Familia” and much more. It was a very fun trip!

Ciao!

//John

We, Team O, are now close to finishing our observation phase at the hospital.

It has been a true privilege to observe the Women´s Clinic. All team members have received the honor to witness the beginning of an entirely new person’s life.

The patients have shared their most important moments in life with us. We have witnessed the relief and overwhelming joy of the parents when they get to hold their baby for first time, and it has been practically impossible for some of us to hold back the tears.

However, even though the vast majority of all childbirths receive a happy ending, the road from pregnancy to delivery is still paved with potential complications.  This means that we also have witnessed some of the most troublesome moments in the patients’ lives. We have learnt about shattered dreams and painstaking worry.

In short it has been a whirlwind of emotions being placed at the Women’s clinic. Amidst all the emotions we have also become familiar with anatomy, pathology, equipment, processes and sub optimal IT-systems.

Last but certainly not least we have observed the relentless efforts of the staff. They work on tough schedules and in stressful situations.  But their work for continuous improvements and skill practice is admirable, and something that many industries could learn from.

Doctor’s skill training to deliver breech birth (when the baby is born bottom first)

We will now move into the second phase of the program and start sifting through the many observations we have made during our time at the clinic. We have however decided to keep our base at Danderyd’s Hospital, to be able to go back and validate and deepen our observations at a later stage.

That´s all for now from Team O. /Carina (business manager)