Next Steps
Published in
2 min readMar 7, 2018
From our Surveys and interviews we were able to identify the overlapping issues and key opportunities for design:
Overlapping Issues:
- Even though everyone wants to have a painless and peaceful death, many people generally fear talking about it. This includes patients, family members, and even physicians.
- This fear leads to the late referral of patients to palliative care or even at all. This stops patients from taking advantage of the resources that are available to them.
- Nobody wants to overburden their primary caretakers by talking about the process of dying. This actually creates more suffering later on.
Opportunities:
- How might we normalize/destigmatize death or socially more acceptable for everyone in general?
- How might we increase awareness(for the general public) of the necessity of end of life care?
- How might we foster conversation about life & death between families/people (patients to family members, children to parents…etc)?
- How might we make the benefits of palliative care perceivable. Practically and pragmatically (show them that the work they put in will be beneficial to themselves when the time comes)?
Scenarios and Storyboards
Some crazy ideas:
- Educational reform that requires students (high school and college) to take classes about advanced directives (get people thinking about death) normalizing. Similarly to sex education within a health class.
2. Community level education/workshop provided by either the government(city, state, neighborhood level) about end of life care, advance directives, life & death…etc
3. Website that rebrands palliative care or normalizing death, becomes a useful resource that palliative care advocates can refer people to. The website will have:
- facts about palliative care
- Stories from patients + primary caretakers
- testaments from experts such as physicians
- discussion forum that allows people to share ideas and give advices
4. A game with storytelling components. Opportunity for people to share their deepest thoughts about life in general with talks about death as a component.
