This blog feels a bit like one of those ‘how it started, how it’s going’ memes. 11 years ago my daughter was born via emergency caesarean at 30 weeks. Rose was born weighing just over 1kg and spent 2 months in neonatal intensive care. It was challenging, traumatic and something I wouldn’t wish any new parent to experience.

Fast forward 9 years and I found myself sitting in an initial project meeting for the PICU Partnership Project, one of 8 key projects within the Health Excellence AcceLerator (HEAL) initiative. HEAL, a collaboration between the QUT Design Lab and Clinical Excellence Queensland, brought design-led researchers into healthcare settings across a variety of projects. The PICU Partnership Project comprised a small team of QUT researchers with specialities including interior architecture and visual communication design. Alongside staff and families in the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) of the Queensland Children’s Hospital in South Brisbane we worked to imagine a more supportive environment for families of children in intensive care.

Of the large number of people in that initial meeting, I found myself sitting right next to paediatric physiotherapist, Ali Ferguson. Towards the end of the meeting, I decided I would share my story. I spoke up, telling Ali, and the group, that I remembered her caring for Rose at the Royal Women’s Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), some nine years earlier. From that point, and throughout the entire project, I sensed the clinical staff looked to me not just as a researcher or designer, but as an ally. They said as much. “You’re one of us”, on the first tour of the ward that same day. I knew their world, and thus was afforded a level of inclusion, hard-earned by the most challenging experience of my life.

Connecting with PICU staff was a project highlight

In my role as HDR student intern I spent 1/day a week at PICU, embedding myself in the space, getting to know key staff and eventually opening dialogue with parents willing to discuss their experiences. The design focus areas were Interior Design and Wayfinding and visual communication students from QUT were also employed as part of a Workplace Integrated Learning program.

Early in the process I helped to envisage specific strategies for data collection via. our engagement with families and staff. Three engagement strategies were developed and enacted: static interactive displays, a parent pack and a drop-in marketplace installation.

They say good design starts with empathy, and this was certainly the case in this project.

Empathy in this project was crucial and needed to be embedded at every stage of our process. The staff and families in an intensive care unit simply do not have the luxury of forward planning or commitments of large amounts of time. This informed our co-design strategies and they became purposefully optional, short, visual, and self-directed. The PICU Marketplace strategy was something I am particularly proud of. Allowing families and staff to ‘drop-in’ to various engagement strategies over a two-day installation was such a successful approach, that the director of PICU has adopted this strategy for internal engagements in the unit.

Alongside the more formal engagement strategies, I became responsible for meeting families and conducted several recorded interviews. I felt privileged to sit with these families, hear their stories, concerns and make connections. I found that if I shared just a little of my own experience with Rose, they really opened up. I could almost see it in their faces ‘you’re one of us, you’ve been where we are’ and they’d want to talk.

In May, alongside a large number of other HEAL projects and the PICU Partnership Project team, I presented to a room of over 100 health professionals and spoke for the families of PICU. By the end of that year the HEAL project had won, not one, but two Good Design awards! An absolute credit to the entire team.

The HEAL experience was an incredible opportunity to use design thinking to make a difference.

At a personal level it was both a gift and a challenge. I was challenged most days on this project to rise above the emotional triggers of being in an intensive care ward for children, meeting and seeing families at the very worst times in their lives, but I was also gifted with an opportunity to do good.

In late 2021, I was invited to another HEAL project, this time as a supervisor of Interior Architecture students who turned my spatial concepts into Virtual Reality. We returned to PICU for another iteration of the PICU Marketplace to share and text our ideas with staff and families. In late 2022 I was invited back to HEAL 2.0…..this time as an integral part of team tasked with making design improvements to the Neonatal ward in the Royal Womens Hospital, the very place Rose was born 11 years earlier. A complete full circle. This project continues and we are working hard to imagine and implement a more supportive environment for families with babies in intensive and special care.

In 2023, a book will be published summarising all of the HEAL projects. I have contributed to two chapters and was also invited to write my own personal reflections – NICU Mum to PICU Researcher.

The best bit? Knowing I’m making Rose proud.