Three SID students, Johanna Waal, Kaisa Spilling and me, Pia Rytilahti, got an interesting possibility to facilitate a development project workshop on 24th April in Suursuo Hospital in Helsinki. The project is a part of Laurea health care students’ studies. The targets of the project are first to develop the quality of interaction between the personnel and patients, also including the relatives of patients. Second, the image of the hospital can be improved by the improved quality. The project continues from the results of a prior project with Suursuo in last semester.

Before the workshop the students participated in the daily life of 8 hospital sections. Based on the observations and interviews of patients and personnel, some fictive personas were created and stories about their patient journey.

Facilitating is a tough job

The agenda was planned carefully for the workshop. The facilitators met few times Kirsi Ronkainen, the teacher of the students, to get the target clear: by co-creation to recognize the new possibilities for interaction improvement. The result of the workshop should be concrete ideas to implement in the hospital

The workshop was very intensive 4-hour-working with about 40 representative of personnel and 20 students. After Kirsi’s and Kaisa’s brief introduction of the topic and facilitators, Johanna ran a brief warm-up exercise. Pia introduced the groupings to teams and work began.

First, the students in the teams introduced the personas and stories, both in positive and negative point of view. Based on the stories, the first exercise was to create a customer journey (“potilaspolku”) and then to draw an emotional mapping (“tunnepolku”) and comments for each step of the journey. Phew! Now we needed a break with a cup of coffee!

After the break, the most prominent challenge to develop was chosen by the team from the findings of the maps. Then started ideation – by using 10&10 method. First so many concrete development ideas (“10” ideas) related to the challenge were created in given time, 3 minutes. Then the each member of the team introduces her ideas, and the ideas were grouped. After that the most interesting idea or group was chosen – and then “10” new ideas from that. Finally, after all ideation, the team was asked to pick the most prominent concrete idea which would have a positive impact to customer satisfaction and would be easy to implement.

Drama as a prototyping tool

We made some warming up to get ready for the last part of the workshop. Johanna led us to use our breathing and body movement – which were needed in the presentation. After 20 minutes preparation each team presented their development idea, most of them with drama. All presentations were very good, and each team gave their best to make their idea alive.

Facilitating reached the goals

It was a busy day, but with sound plans and good methods the target for the workshop was achieved. A big group of people non-familiar to service design fundamentals had a productive and openminded co-creation session. It was awesome to participate with our small share in this development project, which will have tangible impacts on daily lifes of patients and their relatives, as well as the personnel of Suursuo hospital.