Dar ul Sukun - Home for Senior Citizens
Dar ul Sukun Home for Senior Citizens at M.A. Jinnah road, Karachi, Pakistan, is a center dedicated to providing its elderly residents, quality housing and healthcare services. They accommodate marginalised and abandoned as well as paying residents. This service design projected aimed to study the residents experience with the healthcare services & explore possibilities for optimizing the organisational structures.
The Stakeholder Mapping process was crucial in developing an understanding of all the actors that play a role in our chosen location, & made us consider distant external stakeholders.
Stakeholder Map
The primary research methods for data collection were observation, shadowing and contextual interviews. Although the interviews were conducted informally to make the interviewees comfortable enough to open up, the questions to be asked were pre-determined and tested. The greatest concern with interviewing the residents was avoiding discussing their family or past, because it made them highly sensitive, and caused them to get upset. Navigating such conversations was tricky.
Following the stakeholder interviews, we synthesized our findings and were able to create a customer journey and persona's for the primary stakeholders.
Customer Journey Map
Journey Mapping
Journey Mapping is really what brings the human centered approach to Design Research. Conversations with the staff, branch management and the elderly residents, brought forward completely different viewpoints of the same process. Studying the service in isolated fragments, or without interaction with the resident's would not have led to similar insights. The focus on the customers motivations, needs and pain points, allowed accurate framing and sharper focus on the problems that were creating friction.
Service Blueprint
Research Synthesis
The categories of Accommodation, Nutrition, Clinical Services, Physiotherapy & Recreational Therapy were identified as the core departments contributing to the Healthcare services. These areas were analysed in detail to identify & resolve the pain points of the resident’s healthcare experience.
Persona's
This project was conducted in the first half of 2020. Due to the lockdown, the project had to be continued remotely after the initial research synthesis phase. Unfortunately, we couldn't actively engage with the stakeholders or conduct on-site prototype testing.
However, we proceeded to utilise our findings to explore how the healthcare arrangements at Dar-ul-Sukun could potentially be improved. The key insights from the customer research were used as a foundation to develop How Might We statements. Detailed secondary research, such as case studies of international nursing home's and healthcare institutions, aided in the ideation process.
Proposed Innovations
The purpose of this Service Design project was to explore the possibilities of improving the model of healthcare currently employed at Dar ul Sukun Home for Senior Citizens, in order to deliver patient-centred and continuous health care for all residents. Some of the key areas included ensuring availability of all medical supplies, reducing the burden on nursing staff, improving the nutritional status of the residents, improving the impact of recreational therapy and an overall effective improvement in the diagnosis and treatment process for various health concerns. Integrating the suggested solutions into these continually adaptive processes, could significantly improve the healthcare experience of the elderly residents.
