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St. Louis CAPS Student Associates Present to Medical Professionals

On October 25, 2018 the student associates in the St. Louis CAPS Medicine, Health Care and Bioscience course presented their patient-centered emergency room redesign projects to medical professionals at Mercy South Hospital. The student associates worked in teams of three to complete the project and a unique aspect of the team composition was that all team members attend different high schools. During the 2018-19 school year there are eight different high schools that participate in this particular course.

Research for this project included visiting four different trauma-level facilities and interacting with medical professionals. Each team was randomly assigned a specific geographic location across the county in which to redesign an emergency room (ER). Students created a floor plan to display during the presentation and explained unique features that would need to be present given the location of the facility. They were also randomly assigned two patient case studies to diagnose and illustrate their anticipated experience within the redesigned ER. Each team was required to suggest at least two new innovative features that could be introduced to enhance the patient experience. At the end of the presentation students fielded questions from the panel of medical professionals.

Throughout the learning process the students used a patient-centered design process and their final projects displayed attention to details that would make their redesign unique. This included creating a name for their facility as well as a logo and slogan that would resonate with the local community it was created to serve. Other examples of unique features that were created to compliment the student presentations were websites, innovative device models/prototypes, 3-D floor plans, and custom logos sewn into scrubs. This is the fourth year that St. Louis CAPS has worked with Mercy South Hospital on projects and presentation panels.