Timeline
November 2022 – May 2023
Approximately 3000 families experience a stillbirth annually in Canada. Nearly all take place in the hospital setting, where the experience of care can be uneven, confusing, and heartbreaking, from diagnosis to delivery, to discharge home. To help families navigate their hospital experience, BC Women’s Hospital + Health Centre collaborated with the Health Design Lab to “shift [the] focus from helping people to fit our care delivery system, to one where we design our care delivery system to fit people”.
A 17-person core design team collaborated on all aspects of the project. The team included bereaved parents and partners, multidisciplinary clinicians, designers from the Health Design Lab, Indigenous health leaders, program staff and project managers. The goal of the team was to host two workshops (1 virtual,1 in person) with 30 bereaved parent participants to learn more about the in-hospital experience of stillbirth. Content from the workshops was analyzed by the core design team and shared with key stakeholders.
Activities were designed with consideration for both in-person and virtual engagement with sensitivity towards the intense nature of the topic and how to approach the conversations from a trauma-informed perspective to support safe and meaningful sharing and insight gathering.
Insights gained through the workshops were shared with hospital stakeholders at BC Women’s Hospital to inform small and large implementation projects with the intention of improving the patient journey from admission to discharge. The project work and key learnings have also been presented at multiple conferences:
