Team /
Bryn Robertson
Alaina Orr
Yuan Zhu
Role /
Service designer
Timeline /
8 weeks
Thinking about the different phases of a disaster during a co-design workshop
CONTINUOUS LEARNING TOOLS FOR DISASTER PREPAREDNESS
Habitualizing emergency planning and training in senior living facilities
INTRODUCTION
Emergency planning and preparedness are key to mitigating the impacts of natural disasters exacerbated by climate change. The last few years have made apparent the future of increasing climate-related emergencies impacting the Seattle region, and the elderly population is particularly vulnerable to these hazards. Focusing on senior living communities such as Kin On, which provides long term care services for culturally diverse and multi-lingual residents, my team and I sought to improve emergency response and employee training for disaster scenarios.
We identified values that Kin On staff attributed to their work in providing care to residents and reincorporated a human approach to mandated emergency drills and training. This led to the development of low barrier-to-entry tools that would reinforce a practice of disaster and emergency preparedness training as a mindset by integrating it into an accessible and enjoyable element of everyday work.
INITIAL RESEARCH
We conducted exploratory research to understand the internal and external stakeholders involved in a senior living facility during a disaster response. This meant interviewing a resident, a senior programs coordinator at a nonprofit, an Administrator at Kin On, and a building manager and the Director of Operations of another assisted living community. We gathered initial insights from the interviews regarding communication, care, and safety:
Communication
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Staff and residents acknowledge a hierarchy in which information is distributed (senior staff to support staff to residents) and communication of information typically relies on a central point (i.e., a specific person or location)
Care
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Fostering mutual support between residents and staff helps with coping in the midst of highly stressful events
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Senior assisted living facility providers rely on a local network of partner organizations for support during crises
Safety
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Safety involves preparedness, a continuous process with protocols that require constant practice, iteration, and communication
During the co-design, we repeatedly heard from staff that they understood the importance of planning and preparation but that it was difficult to prioritize additional time to it beyond meeting requirements due to limited resources and the demands of their daily responsibilities.
CONCEPT PROTOTYPING
We recognized that the act of preparing is a continuous learning activity and that no singular solution would be effective for everyone in terms of how they learn and retain information or how it fits into their particular role. My team and I developed two concepts that built on existing practices and protocol such as Kin On’s Disaster/Emergency Response manual and the regular staff meetings and drills they held.
Our first concept was a knowledge building tool prototyped as a card deck. This tool would condense information from the manual into an easy-to-review, portable format and facilitate individual or group review with a set of disaster scenarios. It would also take a holistic approach to preparedness by including actionable strategies and instructions on calming techniques and emergency tools or supplies management.
Our second concept focused on improving communication skills, particularly in high stress, fluid situations. We envisioned this as additional training on effective and proper communication protocol between staff members especially when adding new communication tools, like walkie talkies, to the emergency supplies kit. Staff should receive mandatory instruction on how to use, troubleshoot, and maintain communication devices. The training should be fun and include a gamified exercise for staff to practice using the tools and should emphasize teamwork and team-building.
MAPPING THE PROCESS
We created a future-state blueprint and journey maps that outlined how these concepts could be incorporated within a mid-level manager’s daily workflow with opportunities for them to pass on their preparedness knowledge to other staff and residents. The blueprint also emphasized the continuous process of learning and preparing for natural disasters, where in the aftermath of an emergency, senior living facility staff should reflect on the experience to improve their protocols and practices to better prepare for the future.
NEXT STEPS
We would need to validate our concepts with Kin On staff in another workshop and work with them to iterate on the blueprint and journey maps. To test the knowledge building concept, we would build a low-fi prototype of the card deck and observe if and how staff incorporate such a tool into their daily work patterns or whether the information is relevant to their work. Further, it would be important to continue working with staff to identify other areas within their daily workflow and the facility’s emergency planning strategy that can be adapted to help reinforce the mindset of preparation and empower staff to best care for one another and their residents during worst case scenarios.
**Special thanks to the Kin On and Aegis staff and residents for their time and contributions throughout this project.
From our preliminary research, we realized that emergency preparedness and response differs at each residential facility depending on their organizational structure, their access to resources, and the types of residents they intake. We narrowed our focus to Kin On and the protocols they have in place for training and response. Our interviews guided us towards mid-level management staff (i.e., directors and managers) due to their unique positions where they directly interface with all levels of staff, residents, and external vendors. They, therefore, often serve as the central point of information distribution and are also receptors of information with the ability to implement changes to meet the needs of staff and residents.
CO-DESIGN WORKSHOP
To better understand how the different roles of mid-level management staff interrelate and support one another before, during, and after a disaster scenario, we organized a co-design workshop with 6 heads of departments and the Administrator. During the workshop, we asked staff members to identify values they attribute to their work and to use those values to guide their goals and actions during the three phases of our scenario. After individual reflection, participants convened in a group discussion about aligning values and goals to effectively work as a team while maintaining the best care possible for residents during an emergency.
From the co-design workshop, we were able to develop an ecosystem map that illustrated the network of actors at a senior living facility and the channels or props used in the event of a natural disaster. We also developed a set of values that Kin On’s emergency planning and response
should reflect, which were derived from insights shared during the co-design session and would inform our next prototyping phase.
