Week Six Findings

October 12–18

Direction

After speaking with Kristin and Laura on Wednesday, we narrowed down our focus from a virtual volunteering platforms, to an app for volunteers that can provide them with volunteer training, a place to ask questions, and somewhere for volunteers to interact with eachother, support eachother, and create a community.

Targeted users:

• Volunteers in UPMC, with a focus on student volunteers who would like to pursue a medical degree in the future
• Digital natives

Goals:

• Provide volunteers with proper training on how to interact with people who have disabilities
• Give guidance on specific tasks or roles
• Allow volunteers to connect with eachother

App

Our proposed app will have three sections, training, support, and resources

Training

• How to interact with patients especially those with disabilities
• How to listen and provide emotional support

Support Network

• Volunteers can interact and connect with each other virtually
• A place to find support and ask questions related to healthcare and volunteering
• Creating a community for volunteers

Resources

• A place to find more information
• Training and other information readily available

Feedback from Friday

After presenting our idea and our slides to the professors, the feedback we recieved was mainly on the order and content of our presentation. For the recording of our presentation on Monday, we’ll reorder the slides so that it flows better, and add more context on the volunteers themselves, the problems they may face such as long hours, and add a focus on training volunteers to interact with patients who are BLV. In addition, our presentation also spent too much time going through our initial research, so we’ll shorten that to summaries.