Methods: This study was a nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest design study. We constructed a workshop on “design thinking for optimizing clients’ outcomes” as a pilot educational program. Design thinking is a systematic innovation process that prioritizes deep empathy for end-user desires, needs and challenges to fully understand a problem in hopes of developing more comprehensive and effective solutions (Roberts, Fisher, Trowbridge, & Bent, 2016). The evidence has indicated that healthcare design has brought an improvement of patients’ outcomes and cost effectiveness (Zadeh, Sadatsafavi, & Xue, 2015). The six-hour workshop contents were developed with two experts working in the department of hospital culture innovation in a leading hospital in Korea. The first hour and a half were used to understand the concept of design thinking and its cases. Next, the process of design thinking was introduced for 1.5 hours. At this time, to help students’ understanding, students who paired with each other practiced “making a wallet” according to the other student’s request. During the next 3 hours, they practiced design thinking on the topic of “fall prevention in a hospital” with an empathize, define, ideate, and make a prototype (idea sketch) process. Forty junior nursing students were the subjects of the study. All of them have performed 270 hours of clinical practice. Twenty participated in the workshop, and 20 were in the control group. The workshop was held at the beginning of summer vacation (June 2018). PS was measured as a pretest in both the experimental and control groups before the workshop. The posttest will be performed in the middle of the next semester (October 2018) and at the end of the next semester (December 2018). Also, focus group interviews about the influence of the workshop experience on the students’ clinical practicum and their PS will be performed.
Results: There was no significant difference in the PS scores of the experimental and control groups. In PS, practice competency, innovation and contribution scores were lower in both groups than other areas. Twenty students who were in experimental group were divided into three groups, and three prototypes on fall prevention were developed: a fall prevention method while moving in a patient’s room at night, a fall prevention method during wheelchair ambulation, and a fall prevention method during conscious sedation endoscopy.
Conclusion: Nurses should be experts in design who improve safety in the healthcare environment (Stichler, 2014). Design thinking education for nursing students is expected to help the PS process by not only practicing identifying client needs and using innovative thinking to satisfy the needs, but also with problem-solving experiences. In nursing education, it is better that design thinking is used on a smaller scale (use of specific methods rather than the full process) for individual problem solving, everyday group work, meetings and, recently, projects aimed at overcoming resistance to the implementation of new ideas (Carlgren, Rauth, & Elmquist, 2016).