Have you ever had to provide a urine sample for the doctor? Recent research in a Brisbane Emergency Department found that nearly half – 41.5% of all mid-stream urine samples – collected from women were contaminated. While contamination rates vary by site, institution, collection, storage and transport, poor patient technique – due to inadequate instructions – is a key reason for contamination.
Eley and colleagues (2016) developed and tested a graphical illustration to simply explain the process to patients, with this intervention reducing contamination rates from 40% to 25%. But, when the Clinical Excellence Queensland led PROV-ED Project (Promoting Value-Based Care in Emergency Departments) started to explore rolling these posters out to other EDs – as the Reducing Urine Contamination in Emergency (RedUCE) initiative – initial feedback from staff and consumers was that the original design was overly graphic, especially for use with children and in different cultural contexts.
Who was involved?
Part of Clinical Excellence Queensland’s Healthcare Improvement Unit, PROV-ED Project (Promoting Value-Based Care in Emergency Departments) coordinators Tanya Milburn and Sarah Ashover reached out to the HEAL team for help in redesigning the poster. Professor Evonne Miller (HEAL co-director), Professor Lisa Scharoun, and HDR Intern Zoe Ryan worked on the project.
What was the process?
The team explored several options to improve the experience of urine collection – from an infographic, to disrupting the process and designing a different container for urine collection (see, for example, the Peezy https://peezymidstream.com in the UK), to developing animations that turned urine collection into a game for children. In the end, we settled on redesigning and simplifying the poster, using a gestural drawing approach (a loose form of sketching that expresses movement by capturing basic form).
What was the outcome?
We combined what had been separate posters for men and women into the one poster, and reduced the number of steps, to further simplify the process. The final design, which has gone through multiple rounds of iterative design sessions about the images, the number of steps, and the narration, is presented here.
- Eley, R., Judge, C., Knight, L., Dimeski, G. & Sinnott, M. (2016). Illustrations reduce contamination of midstream urine samples in the emergency department. Journal of Clinical Pathology, 69(10), 921-5.
