COVID meets creative clinical

Put together teams of nursing and design students and you'll get creative, real-world solutions to some of health care's most pressing problems, such as ongoing challenges related to COVID-19.

That's what happened when UC students in the College of Nursing's Accelerated Direct-Entry Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) program collaborated with undergraduate industrial design students in the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP) to develop products or processes that tackle COVID-induced issues.

The results ranged from educational interventions for young at-home learners with ADHD to retractable shades meant to prevent virus transmission on airplanes to self-cleaning playground equipment to an online support network for overwhelmed nurses.

Sims and her teammates solved this issue by creating an apron with straps that helps nurses safely rotate deceased patients for post-mortem care. Leveraging the hospital bed rails, the product allows a single care provider to do the heavy lifting. Meyer and Cassedy created a prototype and the team tested it in the College of Nursing's simulation laboratory with four users who provided feedback that informed the final concept.

"I tell students that if you want to learn to think differently, learn a different skillset, have an opportunity to have an interprofessional experience and collaborate with a designer, then you should sign up," Goodin says.

Goodin and Doehler have developed a pedagogy for the collaborative, called "Touch-and-Go Collaboration," which fosters teamwork, but also allows for discipline-specific breakout sessions through five project phases. About a year before the semester starts, Goodin and Doehler meet to choose a focus for the next student cohort. In 2020, the pair received a $15,000 UC Forward grant to focus on COVID, which, Doehler says, presented a unique topic for its ubiquity.

"It was right at our fingertips," he says. "We were seeing it every day. We were
living it. We've never had a topic that was so global and where we were all in it. The
information was changing constantly, and everyone was learning how to be agile
inside of it."

Goodin calls the collaborative a win-win for nursing and design students. "Their
contributions and interaction can be very powerful," she says. Some final designs
have led to employment or commercialization offers.