S10 EP1: Daphne Flynn, Innovation and Technology

Daphne Flynn is the Practice Professor, Design at MADA Monash University Art Design and Architecture.

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Transcript

[00:00:17] David Cummins: G'day, and welcome to the AHDC podcast series, Health Design on the Go. I'm your host David Cummins, and today we're speaking to Professor Daphne Flynn, who with a Bachelor of Arts and Industrial Design, who is honoured by Monash University and now employed as a Professor of Practice in Design.

[00:00:35] Daphne has had an amazing career working in Australia and overseas. Daphne spent most of her time working with Philip's Design in the Asia Pacific region and recently returned back to Melbourne, Australia to work at Monash University.

[00:00:48] We welcome Daphne to hear more about the world of practice in design at Monash University as part of our Future of Health series. 

[00:00:55] Welcome, Daphne. Thank you for your time to be here.

[00:00:57] Daphne Flynn: Thanks David. I'm really happy to be here. 

[00:00:59] David Cummins: I've interviewed a few people now and I've never actually heard of a Professor of Practice in design who hasn't done any study in that area. Can you just help explain that for a few people in this world and how they can become a professor without the copious amounts of study?

[00:01:17] Daphne Flynn: Yeah, it's a pretty wild concept. 

[00:01:19] What it's all about is that the position of Professor of Practice really just recognises an equivalent amount of work or study equivalency to the study that's been achieved through working. So, I mean, I've been working design for many years more than I care to admit.

[00:01:37] And this is just saying that, okay, I've published things, there's things out there in the world. I've got the experience, it's equivalent to a PhD. 

[00:01:45] David Cummins: Yeah, It's very impressive and you're at Monash University at the moment in Melbourne, in Australia and you're part of the Design Health Collab, which is really about the importance of design and human-centred design, but also with a strong focus on healthcare. 

[00:01:58] Do you mind explaining a little bit more about that? 

[00:02:00] Daphne Flynn: Sure. , in universities there's lots of research going on and what we have at the Monash Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture are different labs that have got focus in different areas. 

[00:02:11] So the lab that I've got, which is the Design Health Collab, really focuses on applying our design methods to solve healthcare challenges. So all of our work has a connection to healthcare and health and wellbeing.

[00:02:26] David Cummins: When we talk about the future of health, is your study predominantly the problems today and how we solve them today through stronger integration and interdisciplinary meetings? 

[00:02:35] Or is it about the future of health and how we resolve tomorrow's problems today, especially knowing the aging population and the way the world is going to the next 10 to 15 years?

[00:02:45] Daphne Flynn: Yeah well, design by its very nature when we are thinking about looking at people's needs or the needs of healthcare in this question is that we are always looking into the future a bit, right? 

[00:02:57] So it depends how far into the future. So we may be looking at a challenge that can be solved in the near future, in the next year or two, but ultimately the types of work we are doing, thinking about everything from meeting unmet clinical needs in terms of developing a new med tech product or a medical device that meets an unmet clinical need or we think about the systems and services that are part of healthcare. 

[00:03:25] And ultimately when we think about the future of healthcare, we are really thinking about a bandwidth, but really thinking about what are the big systematic changes that we could be thinking about that healthcare needs in order to overcome the present challenges that we are faced with. 

[00:03:44] David Cummins: Because the thing I like about healthcare and healthcare infrastructure is that it's so complex and there are so many moving parts, and you really have to work as a team because not one person knows everything. 

[00:03:54] So how do you get that many people and understand that many moving parts to try and have a stronger, positive outcome, not only for patients, community staff, users, families, like how do you actually go through that journey?

[00:04:11] Daphne Flynn: Yeah, so how we go through the journey is if we're talking about future healthcare, we've got an initiative now at Monash called The Future Healthcare and what we are doing is recognising that complex challenges require an interdisciplinary approach. 

[00:04:29] So what we are doing is tapping into the deep sector expertise that we have in all the faculties within Monash, and then together with our healthcare partners that are situated in hospitals that we are collaborating with, and then together with industry partners as well, we're working together to collaborate together to understand what the real challenges are. 

[00:04:54] So what the real questions are that we need to answer and then how, how do we all come together to work around a focus of a particular challenge and we recognise it's not just one person that does that and designs really ideally positioned to facilitate those discussions with those sector expertise or sector experts. 

[00:05:18] David Cummins: So do you mind giving an example of that, because that's a pretty broad statement, do you mind giving an example of your studies at the moment, in your research at the moment at Monash? 

[00:05:26] Daphne Flynn: Yeah, sure. 

[00:05:27] So one example is we are working together with our partners at Monash Health for instance, in the emergency department, where we are looking at broadly the patient experience from entering into the system in coming into the emergency department, have they come to the right place for their care. 

[00:05:49] And then we are looking at if they're treated in the emergency department and enter into the hospital, what is their experience of being admitted into a ward and ultimately treated and discharged? 

[00:06:01] And it's all connected, it's all circular. Beds become available for people that are entering the hospital when patients are discharged. So there's a circular kind of relationship. 

[00:06:12] So in that case, we'd be working with the clinicians that are on the ground in the emergency department. So the actual clinician, we'd be working with the nurses, we'd be working with the nurses in triage, we'd be working with the nurse unit managers. 

[00:06:26] We'd be working with representatives of all the healthcare workers that are involved in that particular context. We'd also be working together with the patients. So we'd be observing them and understanding what their journey is and what their experience is in the system.

[00:06:43] And then on the researcher side, if I'm talking in the Monash University context, there'd be designers involved, there may be representatives from the faculty of IT, so people that understand technologies. 

[00:06:54] There may be people involved from engineering. It depends on the particular challenge that we are looking at. 

[00:07:02] David Cummins: And what would be the benefit of that? 

[00:07:04] I'm a patient and I'm like, well, of course I go to ED and then I go to my ward and then I go home.. What is the ultimate goal and what is the benefit for doing all this study? 

[00:07:14] Daphne Flynn: Yeah, so in this particular case, the benefit is, we know that there's a lot of issues around ambulance ramping and people spending many, many hours sometimes in the emergency department because there's just a lot of people turning up in particular emergency departments and people aren't going through the system quickly enough. 

[00:07:34] And the benefit of having different people looking at a problem from different perspectives is that we can consider all the different aspects that make up the problem of emergency care because it's about the system the clinicians are operating in, it's about maybe the electronic medical record system that they're using. 

[00:08:01] It's about communications, it's about the communication to patients and their carers in order for people to be discharged in a timely way, they need to understand what their care needs to be, once they leave the hospital, they need to leave with the right medication. 

[00:08:21] So there's a lot of different players involved and they all need to be involved also in creating a solution to a problem. 

[00:08:31] David Cummins: So would that then say overall a policy would change or an Australian Health Facility Guidelines might change or a BCA might change or legislation might change or it's more the models of care for the facility? 

[00:08:45] Daphne Flynn: It'll be something around a model of care, it could be a communication tool that's used in a particular context in the hospital. So in communicating what a patient needs to do, then could be a tool that's developed, but it could ultimate be ultimately be a legislation or it could ultimately be in a real systematic change in the future.

[00:09:11] David Cummins: And those models of care, would they just be limited to Monash hospitals or it's something that can be applied to greater Australia or Victoria or overseas? 

[00:09:21] How does that word and research get out for more efficient models of care? 

[00:09:25] Daphne Flynn: If it's a model of care that's being created, it would be starting off in the initial hospital we'd be working with. This is all, I'm telling you, a theoretical framework here. 

[00:09:33] And then that would be implemented and there'd be some publishing around that. But you can imagine if it's working in one hospital in Victoria, perhaps it's adopted into another hospital system and another hospital system so, we imagine that whatever we are doing with one hospital has implication beyond that one hospital. 

[00:09:53] David Cummins: Yeah. I find it all fascinating as a physiotherapist with who's based his whole career on evidence-based design or evidence-based research. 

[00:10:01] I find it's so fascinating to know that people go to that level of detail to actually prove a theory as opposed to a subjective assessment of what shouldn't happen because I think when you've got the evidence behind it, you can't really argue it and if it works in one facility, of course it can work in others. 

[00:10:18] Daphne Flynn: Yeah, exactly. 

[00:10:19] Recently in the last year we were working on a waiting time communication tool, it was a display screen that's inside some emergency departments now that communicate to patients how long they might be waiting.

[00:10:34] And it's all around managing people's expectations as well because we know what happens in emergency departments when people are waiting for a long time, there can even be some violence involved and people lose their temper and all sorts of horrible things have happened in the past.

[00:10:49] So, we started working with one hospital developing that waiting time screen and now we are seeing it utilised in other hospitals. There's a lot of sharing that goes on in the healthcare space. 

[00:11:00] David Cummins: Yeah. 

[00:11:00] It's fantastic and fascinating. What about the next few years? The next 10, 15 plus years, we've got an aging population, all models of care are saying that we won't survive with the amount of beds that we've got, the healthcare system, not only in Australia but globally, is going to be under extreme pressure. 

[00:11:17] How does one explore that wicked problem of an aging population with limited resources and limited infrastructure?

[00:11:26] Daphne Flynn: We are going to be looking at that problem in the same way as we look at all of our problems. We believe that the future of healthcare is really dependent on an interdisciplinary approach. We need to get different expertise around a table to really be diving into these huge challenges and their global challenges. 

So we're also reaching out to our global network. 

[00:11:49] In September, we're actually going over to Italy to meet with our European academic partners who are all working in the future of healthcare space in different ways. We work together with one group. 

We've got friends in the uk that are working very deeply in the aged care space.

[00:12:08] So we hope to learn from each other and learn how we could all be working together to address these really wicked problems and we've already been working in the aged care space here in Melbourne. 

[00:12:22] It was a slow start for us because we started working with them with a residential aged care facility just before Covid, and we're hoping to continue that research, but we've got a couple of projects underway in that space.

[00:12:35] But definitely David, you're absolutely right, these are huge challenges and they need huge collaborations in order to address them, I believe. 

[00:12:45] David Cummins: I'm just wanting to know a little bit more about, obviously we've just gone through the pandemic and you talk about these big problems that all these industry experts, whether it's an architect, a clinician, infection control management, construction, all those things...

[00:12:59] Surely you've got the one percenters, like we always call it in construction, when if the alien comes down and takes over the site, like the one percenters of the what if this, what if this, what if this... does it ever come up in in your world?

[00:13:12] Like what if we have another pandemic? What if, what if the hospital system is got extreme stress with limited resource. At what level does your study go into the what if kind of scenarios?

[00:13:23] Daphne Flynn: Yeah. I suppose with in design, we're always speculating a little bit and looking into that what if space... I think what the pandemic's really taught us is that anything can happen and although we're not saying, okay, what if this happens again? 

[00:13:41] But we are now in this situation where the pandemic actually helped amplify a lot of the issues that were already existing in the world. I think you can probably say that in a lot of different contexts, not just in healthcare.

[00:13:55] So it's really shone a spotlight on some big issues. Even in things like workforce, that's a big issue in healthcare and we possibly see even how design could play a role in thinking about the workforce issues in healthcare and only in from the point of view of thinking about things or helping people who are expert in particular areas like workforce development, how can we think about these in different ways? 

[00:14:27] David Cummins: I know there'd be actually a significant amount of people that would love to know the answer to that question. 

[00:14:33] Daphne Flynn: We would too, David. 

[00:14:35] David Cummins: Because it seems to be a very common question in a lot of hospitals around Australia at the moment, like, where do we get staff? How do we retain staff? How do we bring back people? How do we train more 

[00:14:45] It seems to be common theme, not only in Australia, but around the world at the moment. So any tips for those listening at the moment? 

[00:14:51] Daphne Flynn: Well, all I can say is that you get some designers involved, and to help you all think about the issue that you're dealing with in perhaps a novel way and a different way. 

[00:15:02] That's all I can say because design's been invited into the healthcare space over the last years because the challenges are so big and design offers a different way of thinking about any challenge really. 

[00:15:16] David Cummins: I think it's a really good point. 

[00:15:17] So just say people are out there in the world who do want to engage a design thinker in the world of health, how do we find you? Like is it just a simple phone call from a hospital, say, we need help with staff, or we need help with this, or we need help with this...

[00:15:33] Like how do people find people like you? 

[00:15:36] Daphne Flynn: We're always engaging with the public, so we work with industry partners as well. 

[00:15:40] We are working with a company at the moment called Micro X that are based in South Australia that develops some really novel nano-based CT X-ray, X-ray units. 

[00:15:52] We are working with public organisations and of course we work together to work with other partners, get some grant fundings or some funding together to support our research, we are open to conversations for sure.

[00:16:08] David Cummins: That's good to know. I think a lot of people will be very happy to hear that, to be honest. 

[00:16:12] Just before we go, is there anything else people should start to think of now in if they're doing the design phase or feasibility phase or business case phase for projects when it comes to big-scale projects, Is there any tips and tricks you can give people, especially when it comes to the world of stronger models of care and better design?

[00:16:31] I think ultimately, always bring it back to the people that we're trying to serve in our design challenges, so always keep people in the centre.

[00:16:40] Daphne Flynn: So when we think about future healthcare, there's a lot of different scales in that, but we always start with placing the people who we're designing for and caring for right in the middle and just always centre everything around that. 

[00:16:54] That's why co-design is so important to listen to the voice of the lived experience, listen to the people around that person and what they're going through delivering care. 

[00:17:05] And then also thinking at the larger scale of the systems and the models of care, systems of care around delivering healthcare at to a particular group of people.

[00:17:17] David Cummins: Professor Daphne, it is time, but my mind is boggling with how powerful that tool is and how much knowledge you have and the power with which you can actually change not only models of care but patient lives. 

[00:17:29] And I think if we all keep patient-centred care at our number one focus, then a lot more collaboration and a lot more positive outcomes will ensue.

[00:17:37] So thank you so much for your dedication to this industry. I think you will get a few phone calls and I think you've really promoted this industry very well, where people can actually solve big problems if we work together. 

[00:17:48] Daphne Flynn: Great. Thank you David. Thanks for having me on. 

[00:17:51] David Cummins: You have been listening to the Australian Health Design Council podcast series, Health Design on the Go.

[00:17:56] If you'd like to learn more about the AHDC, please connect with us on our LinkedIn or website. Thank you for listening.