New Online Curriculum Equips Nurses to Lead Innovation by Offering Training in Design Thinking

Unique suite of materials developed at Penn Nursing in collaboration with the Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation is available free of charge to all nurses, nursing programs, and health care innovators.

Nurses make up the largest and most trusted group of healthcare professionals, work on the frontlines of the healthcare system, and are frequently called on to devise on-the-spot solutions to urgent healthcare problems, yet most nurses receive little or no training in how to effectively address these design challenges. An online curriculum called Design Thinking for Health supports creative, action-oriented thinking and methodological problem solving by nursing innovators – including students, clinical nurses, clinical leaders, and researchers – by providing access to Design Thinking techniques with a focus on nursing-relevant issues.
 
The new open source Design Thinking for Health curriculum is available free and may be used or adapted by any nurse or nursing program to support nursing-driven innovation. It was created through a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and the Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation and will be jointly owned by the University of Pennsylvania and the foundation.

The Five Core Elements of Design Thinking
Design Thinking is an action-oriented approach to creating solutions that are focused on the needs and preferences of the people who will use them. It is noted for helping innovators recognize unmet needs, ideate more quickly, generate solutions that are bold yet feasible, and reduce the long-term risk of launching a new idea by emphasizing early and frequent prototyping and testing.

The five core stages of Design Thinking are:

• Empathy: Immersing oneself in the community being served in order to gain insight.
• Define: Defining the problem from the point of view of stakeholders and developing a problem statement.
• Ideate: Using brainstorming activities to generate ideas for tackling a problem.
• Prototype: Building real-life, low-fidelity models of a solution.
• Test: An iterative process of quick and inexpensive tests to gain feedback and refine a solution.

Explore the Design Thinking for Health platform.