SPECIAL SESSION: Using Pause and Flow (physics) as a Method to Improve the Experience for Staff and Patients

Description/Overview: Constructal Law has been used in multiple sciences to illustrate how design can impede or enhance flow. This session will reveal how Constructal Law, physics, was used to study the design of the work environment as reported by staff and the care experience as reported by patients. The first half of this session will examine the work of staff from the USA who conduct care on wards in an acute care hospital with persistent excellent scores of performance. Use of statistics to show ward performance was limited once the best scores were achieved and sustained. There was a desire the staff in these wards to show performance beyond the 95th percentile. Use of statistics in various graphs like bar charts and box plots to show persistent high scores was deemed wanting as it did nothing to shed light on what caused the operations on the high performance units to work well. Based on the limitations of data, it was decided to apply a different kind of mathematics to reveal the design of good functioning units. The process of studying the flow and pause of the work design was achieved through application of Constructal Law. It was a study of the design of work which provided very useful information to go beyond the 95th percentile. Also within the first half of this session, methods will be reviewed how this method of analysis was used to support continued refinement of high performing units. Presenters will identify how the data was generated, dissemination to staff, and used for refining operations. This method was found to engage staff because the staff comments about the process of work was validated by making their views visible and operational for change. This first sub session will also review how this concept has been applied to low performing units as well. The second half of the session will review how Constructal Law was applied to studying the process of caring for patients who reported nothing else could be improved. It was desired to continue the deepening of the caring process that was limited by the current use of statistics’ graphing and reporting. Studying the design of successful caring, using an analysis of pause and flow, too place in an acute care hospital in Scotland, within the National Health Service (NHS). Likert scales within a measure that used Swanson’s theory of caring was supplemented with the patient’s report of what felt caring and what did not feel caring. This analysis of pause and flow revealed specific operations that could be used to enhance the process of caring as reported by patients, despite the patients’ report of nothing needing improvement.