Final reflection
My thinking around my PhD dissertation and research plan has come a long way since I started this course. I initially took this course to learn about data collection approaches specific to the design world. I struggled with the first few weeks where content focused on innovation and creativity. In the healthcare world, there is often a strict protocol to follow and ideas for change are built off of existing research and data. Even when quality improvement projects are taken, there is usually a rushed timeline and the solutions must align with leadership’s beliefs.
A turning point for me in this struggle was the week focused on how to define a problem. The content from this week started to give me the language I needed to be able to advocate for my dissertation to start with this ideation phase. While many faculty have understood my goals to involve patients in the design of health services, I have been met with some resistance around my initial plan to try to best understand the problem from the patient perspective. For too long, healthcare interventions have been created by researchers who work off of other researcher’s data and ideas, yet many outcomes remain poor and more importantly, patients often receive care that is of low-quality and discriminatory.
It was after this week and the next few weeks diving into reframing problems, conducting field research, and considering a problem from multiple perspectives and contexts that I began to share what I was learning in class with my peers and mentors within the College of Nursing. While I still have been pushed to “make a tool that patients will use in a waiting room” or “look at what other people with informatics masters have done,” I am able to more confidently explain why taking that leap to testing a solution is missing the key aspect of understanding and defining the problem. As a reproductive health nurse, I am looking to do a design ethnography dissertation project on the experiences of receiving counseling around contraceptives. Currently, with the media attention given to reproductive freedoms and access given the current political climate, I fear that this attention will continue to drive researchers to jump to solutions before truly understanding what a problem is. I hope that my dissertation will be one step in the right direction to understand where the problem points in the contraceptive counseling experience are from the patient perspective, and what innovations might be needed to make improvements that are equitable and result in safe outcomes.
