IIn challenging environments, and with patient care at stake, smooth transitions among Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) field staff are vital. Charlotte Fountaine, a Service Designer working with MSF, outlines how she's working to redesign the hospital handover process.

I am a Service Design student from Royal College of Art. I'm spending the next six months with Médecins sans Frontières, working to redesign the handover process for key positions in field hospital management. Handover in any job is vital, but in the context of a field hospital it is critical for patient safety.  Service Design is about designing services that work for the people that use them. We use innovation research and prototyping methods in order to create solutions.

The nature of MSF’s work means that the type of handover that incoming staff receive varies greatly, and medical staff can be thrown into new and difficult situations without adequate preparation. Staff will always come and go, working in a field hospital will always be busy. A robust, well-tested handover process is vital.

The first stage of this project is research. We are currently interviewing and running workshops with MSF staff, to understand the challenges they face around handover in the field. The next stage of the project is developing and testing new solutions. MSF staff at all levels will contribute ideas on how the new handover process should look and feel. Those solutions will be tested and proto-typed with incoming and outgoing staff in the field.

Read the full article about innovative service design by Charlotte Fountaine at Doctors Without Borders.