Client: Department of Health
Design: Curtain Lock
Problem:
As part of the design councils ‘Patient Dignity’ initiative we looked at the problem from the patients’ perspective.
The problem we uncovered was that the patient experienced a low locus of control over their environment when in a hospital bed and felt fundamentally exposed. The blue curtain is a thin veil of protection and can be pulled open at any moment, especially when extremely busy health professionals are concentrating on treating many patients.
Solution:
The solution we developed gave the patient agency over their environment by creating a curtain lock. We redeployed behavioural codes to make it universally intuitive to use; using red for the universal colour for stop and shaping it like a long ‘shoe horn’ device that simply hooks over the curtain rail stop the curtain in its tracks.