This week’s guest blogger, Alison Thomson, is a designer who has been collaborating with The Neuroimmunology Group at Queen Mary University and Barts and The London NHS Trust for over 2 years. Previous to that, she studied at the Royal College of Art. Through her work, she often explores ways in which communication and the quality of service provision in healthcare might be improved. In this blog post, she describes The Chronic Facility, a project which uses a restaurant setup as the model for imagining a future health service that better caters for patients’ wants and needs. The importance of redesigning relationships between clinicians, scientists and patients is a key preoccupation of this project, and Alison imagines food to play an important part in enabling them to connect and communicate. Sound interesting? To find out more, read on, and be sure to click through to Alison’s inspiring videos, in which aspects of disease and science are explained and represented through weird and wonderful culinary creations.
The Chronic Facility is a proposal for an alternative healthcare service for people with chronic disease, using the service rituals and dining etiquettes to be found in a restaurant to model ways in which service and communication within the NHS might be improved.
The project suggests a future outpatient department of the NHS with a holistic approach to healthcare. Within the facility, you can ‘dine’ with a scientist who will use food to represent parts of the disease, how treatments work, or research currently being tested. Patients are in effect ‘served’ a clear explanation and visual representation of their diagnosis, rather than being confronted with complicated medical jargon that leaves them feeling frightened and confused about their condition.
The Chronic Facility also attempts to promote the idea that interactions between professionals and patients should be a reciprocal exchange of information, questions and expertise - just as you might expect a dialogue between two people in a restaurant to be. It recognises that people with chronic conditions are well placed to become experts in their illness, since they live with it every day, and it is therefore important to build up their skills and confidence to communicate about and deal with their conditions effectively.
The idea of modelling with food came from meeting scientists who research multiple sclerosis, and recognising that complex terminologies and scientific imagery make it difficult for others to understand their work. Food is a very unthreatening material to model with, as we all remember playing with our food as children. After participating in several creative modelling workshops, the scientists were able to explain their work through these simple physical and visual models.
Public engagement in science
Recently, I secured funding from UnLtd to make a series of “5 minute meal” films with the scientists so that you can see how they designed their ‘dishes’ for The Chronic Facility - you can even make them at home if you like!
The topics that you see in these films range from “How the eye is affected in MS” ,“Why identical twins don't remain identical throughout life”, to “How nerve impulses are controlled by cannabis”. This project is partly about designing ways for the public (more specifically, people with multiple sclerosis) to engage in and understand science. But it also gives people tools - i.e. metaphors, physical materials, imagery and confidence - to have conversations about what happens inside their bodies. These conversations are particularly valuable when they are related to a degenerative disease, such as multiple sclerosis, which can be a sensitive and complex area of discussion.
I have also held a number of events where people can model in food and learn about multiple sclerosis. The most recent one, Digesting Science, was developed in collaboration with Shift.MS, an online community for people affected by MS, where we served the food models designed in “5 minute meals” to guests to facilitate their conversations about science and illness.
Alternative tools to design healthcare
Another project that I am working on to improve the patient experience is based at The Royal London Hospital. Like The Chronic Facility, I am using creative approaches to inspire and engage patients and professionals to improve healthcare services.
One method is using the idea of Big Brother’s diary room to capture patient opinions. Patients are left on their own in an oversized gold chair with a video camera allowing them to rate their clinical experiences according to the quality of care they have received. The project taps into the idea that humour has the potential to relieve stress in patients and staff by presenting the opportunity to forget anxiety and pain for a brief period.
A key part of this method is showing the video footage back to staff, so that they can understand how the service they provide makes patients feel. From this we have identified new opportunities to improve service delivery, and thereby improve the patient experience.
Some more information
To find out more about Alison’s fascinating work, visit her website, or read this article in The Nursing Times, in which a nurse recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis reflects on the significance of The Chronic Facility.
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