Home Help: How something as small as a bag could make a big difference in the NHS

With crowded hospitals and a greater range of treatments available, many patients choose to be looked after at home. Healthcare in the home, though, needs to be as well-thought-out as treatment in the hospital. PhD student David Swann has taken an often overlooked but always present element of nursing - the bag - and considered how this could be improved to reduce disease transmission and make healthcare easier

NHS at Home : A Co-design Research Project to Develop a 21st Century Nursing Bag

The black nursing bag, the indispensible tool of the district nurse, has remained virtually unchanged for over 100 years. The goal of the research is to equip newly formed neighbourhood care teams with a 21st century nursing bag that improves service delivery and patient safety performances through co-design. This work in progress paper outlines the collaborative processes that have steered the development of a 21st century nursing bag

Safe and sound : protection and surveillance in 21st century

Today's society is full of instructions and mandatory actions relating to safety or the anticipation of danger. Countless security instructions detail procedures to avoid any risk in the public space while double door entrances control access to a growing number of places. Our faces, bodies, fingerprints and pupils are repeatedly scanned. Western society is moving towards ultra-security, towards a refusal of the unexpected and an absolute desire for anticipation. The Safe and sound exhibition addresses this phenomenon through design, objects from everyday life, photography and contemporary art in four themes: security, fear, protection and surveillance. Mixing objects that meet a specific need for protection and the points of view of designers and artists, more critical and distanced but not devoid of humour, Safe and sound provides an exciting insight into this facet of our society. The exhibition features three design exhibits from Dr David Swann: ABC syringe, Ebola Bleach Dilution Gauge and the LifeHacket Trio

A behaviour changing syringe : making invisible risk, visible to deter the reuse of syringes in a curative context

Medical devices are a core component of health systems, and thus required for achieving universal health coverage, and have been recognized as indispensable for health care provision in the World Health As-sembly resolution, on health technologies (WHA60.29) in 2007. These health technologies are required in screening, prevention, diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation and palliative care, but their safe use, rational selection, assessment, effective regulation and innovation remain a very complicated challenge in all set-tings, due to the enormous diversity, lack of availability, quality, safety, appropriateness and affordability, particularly in low-resource settings. Therefore, even if important awareness has been raised in the last few years, patients still lack access to priority medical devices and thus much work has to be done by health professionals, governments, academia and industry, among many others. Following the resolution of 2007, the priority medical devices report and the success of the First WHO Global Forum on Medical Devices in Thailand in 2010, WHO became highly committed to the important work related to medical devices. New WHO tools and publications were developed and disseminated to increase awareness in the field in ministries of health, industry and academia. Several workshops and continuous capacity building in various countries and regions led to a high demand from medical device stakeholders, for a second global forum that would follow-up and expand on the topics and recommenda-tions presented previously. Accordingly, in August 2013, WHO determined to convene a Second Global Forum on Medical Devices to take place in Geneva, Switzerland, on 22-24 November 2013. The objectives of the Forum were to: (i) define methods of increasing access to priority medical devices under the Universal Health Coverage initiative; (ii) share evidence on best practices in health technology assessment, management and regulation of medical devices; (iii) demonstrate the development and use of appropriate and innovative technologies that respond to global health priorities; and (iv) present the outcomes of the implementation of the World Health Assembly resolution on health technologies (WHA60.29) and the status of actions resulting from the First Global Forum on Medical Devices..

ROTOЯ : Mobilising Healthcare

The exhibition explores innovative healthcare design and the power of design to improve people’s lives. It considers 150 years of taking healthcare into the community and the home. The show provides a historical, contemporary and future view on the support technologies used by healthcare professionals to deliver patient care away from hospital. Museum objects such as Victorian medical instruments and remedies will be shown alongside contemporary design that will save lives in the future. 'Mobilising Healthcare' features products and prototypes that have purposely been designed to improve patient safety, home healthcare, and emergency care. The show provides an insight to the development of a multi-awarding twenty-first century Nursing Bag designed by Dr David Swann with support from NHS East Riding of Yorkshire. Swann’s Nursing Bag design has been exhibited in California, Copenhagen and London, and will be seen in a new context in Huddersfield’s Mobilising Healthcare exhibition

Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne 2015

The 2015 Biennial will deal with the theme of aesthetics, under the title: The meanings of beauty The ninth edition of the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne, which will be held from the 12th March to the 12th April 2015, questions the importance of forms and the meanings they impart to functions, to uses and the quality of life. What values are transmitted by aesthetics? To what intents and purposes? What do forms say about ways of life, about uses and practices in society? What do they murmur to us about the state of the world? At a time when industrial production is becoming increasingly globalized, how can we reconcile each person’s need for identity with the ever more homogeneous nature of symbols produced by design? Can this discipline liberate the desire and the identity to drive them towards alternative ambitions? How can these identities be reconciled with those of makes and brands? What is the role that design will assume in the aesthetic experience of humanity? How can we cultivate a plurality of forms and experiences? With international selections, the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne 2015 will expose objects, services, installations and environments to its di erent groups of public (designers, enterprises, students, school children and the general public), proposing a sensory experience. The Biennial’s intention is to show that other ways and means are possible compared to the monotonous and repetitive productions of globalization: the aim of the exhibition curators and scenographers is to help its visitors discover and feel what aesthetic expression can offer. Dr David Swann's ABC Syringe is showcased within HYPERVITAL, an exhibition curated by Benjamin Loyauté

2nd Design 4 Health 2013 Exhibition

The Design4Health 2013 exhibition showcased a collection of innovative works that explore the use of creative thinking and practice within the context of healthcare and wellbeing. Drawing on conventions of both art and design, the selected works bring together an informed use of material crafts and processes with the dynamic potentials of digital technologies. crafts and processes with the dynamic potentials of digital technologies. The works are driven by a research agenda which sets out to challenge social, cultural and operational preconceptions around how we think about, manage and engage with contemporary healthcare and wellbeing issues. Contributing artist/designers: Sonja Bäumel | Rémi Bec | Tom Bieling | Simon Bowen | Matthew Coombes | David Cotterrell | Matt Dexter | Mark Fisher | Nurgül Isik | Eunjeong Jeon | Tara Mullaney | Heath Reed | David Swann | Koutaro Sano | Alison Thomson | Jonathan Wes

‘The Blood-Self’: reflections on prison writing.

This thesis analyses the development of an original body of creative work written in response to experiences gained during the 14-month period when I was employed by the Arts Council of England as a Writer-in-Residence at HMP Nottingham Prison (housing mainly lifers and long-term inmates). The creative work arose from a specific jail environment, described in the thesis as being formed from an uneasy combination of punitive, managerial, and rehabilitative concepts. The thesis argues that the creative work owes a direct debt to the ideas and practises that confronted me while I was attempting to build literacy skills in the prison. However, jail is stultifying for both teacher and student – and, ultimately, the thesis goes on to identify the additional, unexpected imaginative prompts that were necessary before the creative work could cohere into a collection. As well as offering analysis of the work’s slow evolution, the thesis incorporates a selection of 23 creative prices that emerged. Many of these were collected, a decade after my residency, as a hybrid of prose, poetry, and wood-carvings, entitled The Privilege of Rain (Waterloo Press, 2010), shortlisted in 2011 for the Ted Hughes Award. The creative work was fuelled by a growing desire to pay witness to the ‘Prison Works’ programme, which transformed the jail. This desire was influenced by my journalistic training, but the thesis describes how I began to discover poetry’s potential, and analyses a transformation from reporter to poet. In tracing this transformation, the thesis considers ways in which journalism and poetry differ from, and resemble, each other. Further, it considers the beneficial ‘aura’ (Parini, 2009: 89) of writers who proved influential in the transformation, including Smith, Colburn, Parker, Liardet, Robison, Swift, and Lawrence. The thesis holds out a measure of hope. As well as discussing poetry’s vital part in my own ‘human flourishing’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2013: 17), it considers the role that Creative Writing may play in the rehabilitation of offenders. First-hand instances of rehabilitation, and verbal evaluations of the efficacy of my residency, are combined with inmate writing to suggest that it is possible for individuals to develop imaginative paths through the jail’s ‘forest’. However, fear and inertia are identified as two pressures upon the incarcerated imagination. And the thesis argues that these pressures are connected to societal attitudes and policies that are adding to, rather than diminishing, our problems with crime. Underlying the discussion are three main questions: (1) What pressures does jail exert upon the imagination, and creative expression? (2) What forces operated to create the specific prison environment I encountered? (3) Can writing help in the rehabilitation of offenders

Decolonising the Finnish Baby box: A sociomaterial approach to designing interventions for infant and maternal health and well-being in Zambia

The global spread of the Finnish baby box without empirical evidence to support initiatives raises concern that the concepts of the box are being introduced uncritically in a diverse number of countries, spaces and places without concern for local historical, social, cultural and material understanding. Such appropriation of a significant cultural and social tool for infant health and well-being risks the material object – the box and its contents - being used to develop western, normative parenting practices whilst maintaining power relations between children, parents, expert others and between the Global North and South. To explicate these concerns this article explores potential problems of the box that empirical research is yet to explore including the promotion of westernised parenting practices and child development theory. This gives rise to concerns about colonisation and the need for ethical research practices in a project in Zambia seeking to meet the aims of the UN sustainable development goal 3 – for good health and well-being for all. We draw on sociomaterial understanding in a design project to develop a culturally sensitive and particular concept of the baby box for use in Zambia. One possible local solution is a ‘chitenge’, a multi-purpose garment, rather than a box