ADHB Pharmacy

This project explored how the health and wellbeing experiences of staff and patients in Auckland City Hospital’s Community Pharmacy could be improved.  Using a human-centered, co-design approach, a series of workshops were conducted with pharmacy staff to redesign the community pharmacy. 

During my time at the Design for Health and Wellbeing Lab, I facilitated, managed, and created design collateral for a number of workshops varying in size and scope. My main project looked to see how design could improve the experiences of users at Auckland City Hospital's Community Pharmacy. The current interior layout and architecture of the pharmacy does not enable efficient patient or work flow, allocate enough space for the dispensary, or consider the wider patient experience. Together we explored how these problems could be solved within the existing infrastructure of the existing space. This project produced a packaged document of research, design work, outcomes and recommendations for a future pharmacy space that helped guide staff through design decisions and internal procurement processes of ADHB.

Co-design, Collaboration, Co-facilitation:
In this project I planned, managed and facilitate a total of 3 workshops. The workshop and activities were created with Auckland Hospital’s outpatient pharmacy manger (Ashwin Choy). The partnership helped to develop co-design workshops that helped explore and identify current problems, generate concepts that solve these problems and produce a final tangible outcome. These workshops were collaborative, co-facilitated and co-designed.

Early research revealed that although both pharmacy staff and the DHW Lab understand a variety of existing problems, there was a lack of understanding of the overall user experience for both staff and customers. The DHW Lab used this first workshop to understand the problems of the existing experience as well as the needs, wants, aspirations for a future space.

Workshop 1
The first workshop will be used to discover the true needs of the space and help to begin visualising what the pharmacy could be and how it could work. This workshop will primarily focus on making sense of the ideal pharmacy space. To identify key insights, wants and needs of users which need to be brought forth into the re-design. If time allows we can begin to generate potential layouts.

Workshop 2
This workshop will focus on taking the key insights and knowledge gained from the first workshop to generate potential layouts for an ideal pharmacy space re-design, and an incremental pharmacy re-design.

Workshop 3
This workshop will focus on consolidating previous learnings to produce a tangible layout. This layout should respond to the needs of the future pharmacy. This workshop will help define where the retail/pharmacy counter will be, what kind of interaction that will look like, where specific items/interior fit-out will be and how it effects the work-flow/patient flow in the pharmacy. This workshop helped facilitate decision making to deliver a co-designed layout for a future pharmacy. The activities planned looked to manage user interaction, patient/work flow, and location of items.

Outcomes
The outcomes of the workshops were packaged into a document used as part of a business case. The document outlined the co-design process, results of each workshop, and the final design of a reimagined pharmacy. This can then be used by ADHB pharmacy staff to aid them through internal procurement processes, to provide reason and show how the pharmacy should function and could look like. This project lead to other opportunities such as a design sprint, taking learnings from this project and applying them at Greenlane Hospital’s Community Pharmacy.