Health care professionals have extremely busy work schedules. Unfortunately, they need to spend a lot of their time on administrative tasks, whereas they would like to devote it to helping patients, which is what they were trained for in the first place. Properly designed technology could help to lessen the burden of administration and provide more quality time with patients. In the project COUNT (Communication and Operation on the Unit Between Nurses and Technology), we are working on developing this type of technology for hospital nurses. To make sure we are developing technology that is really helpful to and usable by nurses, we involve them in co-design activities. This is a challenge in itself, similar to the reason why the project was started: nurses have very little time, and it is hard to plan activities since chances of something unexpected coming up are high. Because nurses are so engrossed in their daily activities, it is difficult for them to take some distance to think about innovations, and moreover, technology is generally not of particular interest to them.
In COUNT, we have developed and applied a number of techniques to involve nurses in co-design and to stimulate them to think of possible technological innovations in their daily work. Although the techniques were primarily targeted at hospital nurses, lessons learned apply to a much wider target group of health care professionals.
