Research for Design Week 2

Last Friday Eva and I went to Callen-Lorde to have a short conversation with Preston, the front desk attendant. We asked about their insurance services, electronic health record system, staff training and some small initiatives to build inclusive environment, and the answers we got were rather general. He said he could put us in touch with someone who’s in charge of fellowship to answer our questions, so we left four questions with them, and now we are waiting for the response.

Then we went to The Center, which happened to be nearby, but unfortunately our information was wrong and they don’t provide any health services, they are just a community to help connect people to various health services. After asking the receptionist, we learned that we could put our information on their bulletin boards, so we left our message.

My group continued to follow up with people they had previously contacted, and we reached out to several new users and providers, but there’s few replies.

I revisited the questions I brought up last week in light of my brief conversation with Preston on Friday, and I scrapped my previous thoughts. I’m a little confused because it seems like these directions aren’t completely blank and I’m having a hard time finding a new direction for us to add something.

So I continued reading article, LGBTQ College Students’ Experiences With University Health Services: An Exploratory Study.

Since we probably won’t find the right people to get some information from, I think we can find some ideas directly from these papers.

I summarized several problems that appeared in the paper and their corresponding solutions.

I think my information is still not comprehensive enough, so I went ahead and looked up NYU Langone’s information.

I also checked NYU Langone’s Website trying to do a side-by-side comparison with LGBTQ+ clinics and came up with some solutions.

At our group meeting this week, we discussed what each of us had in mind. Eva read more papers on transgender and non-binary people, and Maria wanted to do a Media Website, as well as some stickers, which had something in common with my idea. We also thought about improving Langone’s website interface, but we decided that we were a little pressed for time and probably we would be doing pretty much the same thing as the other groups, so we finalized our plan to focus on the media outreach section. In addition to adding this section to the website, we’re also thinking about adding LGBTQ+ signage to the physical hospital environment to increase the safety of LGBTQ+ patients.

So our final solution might be:

1. Create a template of LGBTQ+ media room which Langone can attach it to their website. People can directly acquire information about what Langone has to LGBTQ+ people, about their service, their training, their events and some other measurements to help build a inclusive and supportive environment for LGBTQ+.

2. Add some signs, they could be stickers or QR codes, these signs can be placed in intake areas, walls, office doors, waiting areas and other places, these signs will indicate the health center they are seeing not only has basic knowledge of LGBTQ people and issues, but also is welcoming and actively fostering a safe space for them.

Thoughts from this week：

Talking is the most direct way to get information and help.

When there is a lack of ideas perhaps it is because the information received is not sufficient.