Care in hospital emergency departments is provided by highly trained staff who are often overworked due to high demand for emergency services. The service provided by emergency departments are a critical component of the overall Australian healthcare system, as “they provide care for patients who have life-threatening or other conditions that require urgent medical care” (AIHW, 2019). In general, public perceptions of emergency departments are negative and unfavourable based on previous customer experiences, such as long waiting times, inefficient processes and poor communication.

As shown in the statistics above, 72% of Australians visiting emergency departments were seen within four hours. This means that almost a third of patients were waiting more than four hours in the emergency waiting room (AIHW, 2019). Furthermore, 49% of patients presented to the emergency department are triaged as a category 4 or 5, which are the lowest priority categories.

Upon performing primary (interviews, contextual observation) and secondary (online reports, statistics) research, we discovered the main problems with patients’ current experiences in the emergency department, which include the following:

Our target users include patients who are triaged into categories 4 or 5, as they are the lowest priority categories and therefore experience the longest waiting times. We are specifically targeting those who are Australian citizens and aged between 18-55.

I, along with my team, developed a solution to improve our target audiences' emergency room experience called: The Flower Patch. This concept consists of a projected flower patch animation on a wall in an emergency room. This projection is a visual live feedback display that represents a patients' wait time through the maturity of their chosen flower. Upon being triaged as a category 4 or 5 patient, they can download the flower patch app and select specifications, such as where their flower seeds will be planted and what type of flower will be represented as their virtual avatar. Through the app, patients are also able to access information about the hospital and in particular, information about how a NSW Emergency Department operates.

This process has been visualised below as a user journey map.