2. Research for Healthcare

Project Research 1

Pirates of Design are working on a project dealing with a domain space for rural and urban healthcare. Our team wants to get insights that would help us derive a solution on how we could improve the healthcare in the rural areas by connecting the rural areas to the urban areas together. Our team needs to get insights for this in order to come up with a solution that actually helps solves the problem for the people. This research will be so helpful to us, as we have to understand our users and the problems being faced by them so we could break the connection. As such, we came up with some questions that will help us learn more about our users and the actual difficulties faced when it comes to healthy care There are several methods that we use in order to achieve our goals, some of them are:

1. Contemporary Literature
2. Other published documents: statistics or reports
3. Interviews
4. Feedback from standup meetings

In the next paragraphs, we will summarize all the findings we have into insights. We will explain how we got into certain decision in our design process.

Contemporary Literature

There are several literatures that we continue to study in order to get to know our audience problem. We have difficulty in finding the right literatures that represent Australia in order to satisfy the needs of Australia Healthcare. We decided to focus on exploring the domain problem that might exist in Australia. Some insights that we gain are described below.

As we search for literature papers before in the proposal, the word 'rural' has become vague to our group. Based on Justin Wood paper about rural healthcare, rural meaning is very diverse and could not be explained in short words. 'Rural' could be in between of geographies factors, distance factor, social-economic factors, etc. Wood also encourage us to explain our own 'rural' definition in a project whereas it would narrow down the meaning of the rural itself.

We also curious on the issues people in rural areas have. Hardship from low income, isolation and difficulties reaching essential healthcare are some of the issues rural people face in their daily life. These factors are connected to one another and brings our group to choose this project domain problem which is the issue behind the healthcare in rural areas. It is complicated to measure the improvement or possible services in order to satisfy the whole system.

Rural people generally have poor access to the good healthcare services. Patient often face with no choice to whom they see for treatment. One solution to receive the quality they want is to travel in far distance in order to get the fair treatment. To conclude, the principal barrier of the overall rural health care is the distance, thus, people created telemedicine which remotely provides health care by the internet in order to solve the issue. However, telemedicine has limitation in rural areas that might discourage people or medical teams from using the technology.

Other factor is the availability of the health workers in rural areas. This issue also considered as the main problem. Some ideas to solve the issue are proposed but they are considered as ineffective because of the difficulty in sustaining such system in a long run. The availability of the health worker is mostly affected by attractiveness, recruitment, retention, and health workforce/health system performance factors. (Dolea, 2010)

As our group learn about the factors that cause poor healthcare system in rural areas, we also exploring the cause they have. Our group founds out that the issue could caused serious impact. Some example are:

In Scotland, research has shown that patients with common cancers have less chance of diagnosis before death, and/or poorer survival after diagnosis, the further they live from a cancer centre (Campbell et al, 2000). The statistic conducted from rural health research shows remote Australian have 40% higher death rates in term of coronary heart diseases and 3 times higher chance in term of type 2 diabetes. (Ruralhealth.org.au)

From the Rural Health Research statistic, it also shows that the ratio of the availability between doctors in cities and remote are 2 to 1. Although the statistic from Wood paper shown that rural people have better health than urban people, poor access to a healthcare means that people tend to not get range of options receiving the health services which could cause rural people to not able getting the fair/good treatment. Then, this issue would generate bad repercussion involving medical support in rural areas.

Other published documents

Other published documents are also helping us to build a design decision. Below are the summarized insights we gain from different news or papers. These published documents is getting our group to understand how the healthcare system works in Australia, specifically in Queensland.

Queensland Rural and Remote Health Service Framework from health.qld.gov.au and ruralhealth.org.au There is one solution that is implemented in Australia in order to solve rural healthcare issue. The technology used is called as Telehealth where health services or information are shared via telecommunication technology. Telehealth aims to increase the access of healthcare in greater range geographically. It also aims to reduce the need for patient to travel. There are 5 types of health facilities which are district hospitals, rural hospitals, community hospitals, community clinics, and multi purpose health services that represent the facility services. In conclusion, district hospital provides higher acuity medical treatment and multi purpose health services has the lowest capability in providing medical services. Our group learned that each type has different purpose, limitation, and capability that might affect our project features/functionalities.

Interviews

After doing research, our group conducted interviews with rural people and medical teams. This interview aims to give us qualitative information where we hope it would sparks us with new ideas. Following are some of the questions we asked the healthcare community which was our patients and medical staff. The interviews were made for the rural and urban healthcare communities.

1. What is your role?
2. What is your age range?
3. What device do you mostly use to connect to the Internet?
4. Is there any device you prefer to use apart from the one you mentioned above? If yes, mention it.
5. What do you know about healthcare in rural areas?
6. In your own how would you describe the difference between urban and rural healthcare.
7. Do you know any problems related to healthcare? If yes what?
8. How does the medical staff gather information regarding the rural healthcare?
9. Are there any issues you face when it comes to communicating to the rural healthcare communities?
10. Have you ever volunteered to serve the rural communities to improve the healthcare in the remote areas? If yes, what would be your motivation?
11. What are the constraints that arise when volunteering?
12. If you have volunteered in healthcare opportunities, may you describe your experience?

The questions about were customized for the people in the rural areas and urban areas. We also customized the questions for the medical staff. The interview has been successfully conducted with 2 participants from people that live in rural area and 4 medical staff. Several insights gain from the interviews are summarized as below (Interview transcript could be found in Appendix):

• Device used to connect with the internet for any purpose that medical team mostly used is phone. They also answer computer if they are working or in a workplace.
• Satisfaction to help the system is considered as the most of the motivation factor for doctors to participate volunteering.
• Constraints from volunteering for doctors are lack of funding, travel distance, and time.
• Information regarding rural health care usually available in social media.
• Rural people get updated news about rural area improvement from social media platform like facebook.
• Distance proven as the main problematic factor for rural people to gain the treatment they wanted.
• Improvement suggested is to have trained and qualified staff in the healthcare.

In conclusion, we learnt that the rural health communities have poor health facilities and there is need to help these communities so that they could have a better tomorrow. We also learnt more about the users, on what they preferred and what would work.

As the completion of the interview and research done, our group decided to put forward an idea we called as Medical Network Platform. The platform will expose the urban community to any possibilities to contribute in improving the quality of healthcare in rural areas. The platform will also support social interaction where people could share their experience of the contribution to the community.

Feedback from stand up meetings 1

Design Decisions

Appendix

Dolea, Carmen, et al. “Evaluated Strategies to Increase Attraction and Retention of Health Workers in Remote and Rural Areas.” Bulletin of The World Health Organization, vol. 88, no. 5, 2010, pp. 379–385. [Accessed 18 Sep. 2018].

Edwards, C. (n.d.). American Journal of Agricultural Economics. [online] 58(5),pp.914-921. Available at: https://academic.oup.com/ajae [Accessed 3 Sep. 2018].

Wood, J. "Rural Health and Healthcare" [online] Institute for Health Research Lancester University. [Accessed 18 Sep. 2018].