Violence in A&E

Design Council

Over 100 hours of ethnographic research

Successfully engaged the stakeholders in change

Clear solutions to the issue have been co-designed

It might surprise you to learn that aggression and violence in UK hospital emergency departments is a serious issue. It costs the NHS over £60 million each year in staff absence, loss of productivity and extra security. Most A&E nurses will have encountered aggression and violence: there are over 56,000 assaults in hospitals each year.

The UK Design Council supported a “design challenge”, the third time they’ve done this, on the issue of aggression and violence in A&E. In these projects they ask designers to deal with intractable problems: to use design thinking to create a better understanding of the problems and to create new solutions that can be exploited by the NHS and industry.

The Design Council asked me to conduct ethnographic design research in a major London A&E department over the hectic Christmas and New Year period in 2010/2011. The insights gained were fed into several workshops, which I co-facilitated and which culminated in the creation of 6 briefs for a national design competition. The winning design firm was PearsonLloyd; they co-developed a number of solutions with hospitals trusts, largely around the key issue of ‘awareness’: providing more people with information about the A&E process, and where they are in it.

I spent over 100 hours observing people in A&E, talking with them and with other stakeholders, and developing a series of insights into the problem and ideas for solutions. In this webinar Becky Rowe and I talk about the value of design ethnography and its crucial role in understanding complex, multi-stakeholder issues.