Designing bugs out.

"Patients go into hospitals to be cured of what ails them, but the ugly truth is that some get sick from being there. In 2007, around 9,000 people in the United Kingdom died from hospital-borne infections. Though the National Health Service has implemented procedural changes that have halved the number of antibiotic-resistant staph infections, or MRSAs, in the last three years, the agency is not content to stop there. “We cannot be complacent and must keep up the fight against such infections,” says Paul Cryer, who manages the two-year-old Healthcare Associated Infections Technology Innovation Program for the Department of Health, which sets policy for the NHS and is now targeting the hard-to-clean furniture and equipment that patients come into contact with. The bible of U.K. hospital procurement officers is Supply Chain, which features 620,000 NHS-sanctioned products, from endobronchial tubes to wall-mounted examination lamps. “Furniture in the past has been designed for ease of manufacture and a price that vendors think will attract the NHS,” Cryer says. Though affordable, the Supply Chain offerings are vehicles for pathogens like MRSA and Clostridium difficile. In July 2008, the DH turned to the Design Council for solutions. The resulting program, called Design Bugs Out, began with a team conducting interviews for a month with patients and caregivers in NHS hospitals in Huddersfield, Manchester, and Southampton. From that research, health-care experts determined 11 categories of products in which redesigns could drastically reduce infection-related fatality rates. The Design Council assigned rethinking everyday health-care equipment to the Royal College of Art’s Helen Hamlyn Centre. Furniture and other environmental objects were the subject of a national competition open to teams of designers and manufacturers. The RCA took on hand sanitizers, pulse oximeters, mattress covers, blood-pressure cuffs, and sanitary curtain handles. Its cannula time-tracker, which charts the number of days that an intravenous line has been in place, is already on the market, and the NHS will soon select manufacturers for the other RCA prototypes." via Metropolis There are about 80,000 deaths per year in the United States due to hospital acquired infections. Redesigning both processes and products is tantamount in reducing this risk.