Night Drainage Bags Case Study
Patient safety isn’t the only consideration that comes into play when designers utilise HFE – rather it’s all about the entire user experience. The team at Haughton Design were tasked with re-designing urinary night drainage bags – opaque two-litre plastic bags used by urostomy patients to temporarily store urine during the night, during other periods of rest, or when a typical urostomy pouch is too small. Many users report negative attitudes towards the bags, due to their cheap, stereotypically medical appearance and the feelings of shame they experienced when using and emptying the bags. Hence, our aim was to understand and improve these key areas to produce a more user-friendly product focused on comfort, dignity, and functionality. Working closely with the client’s in-house team, clinicians in the field and users themselves, the design team created a user-needs document that captured the key requirements set out by the user group. This informed the creation of a product-design specification that was then used to conceptualise, prototype, and evaluate several different concepts. Once a final design was selected, it was further refined with input from occupational therapists, nurses and urostomy patients themselves.
The new design was more sustainable – unlike existing products, it was reusable – and had a larger volume, reducing the frequency of drainage and enabling better sleep quality for users. It was also more ergonomic, both for users and health-care practitioners who had to monitor patients’ urine, and utilised high-quality materials that were easy to clean and make ready for immediate re-use. It even had collapsible features to increase portability. Most importantly, however, the design reduced the feelings of embarrassment that users associated with these devices.
Due to the nature of our work and client confidentiality, many of our projects are commercially sensitive therefore cannot be shown or have been composed generically to be anonymous. Please take a look through some of our work to date here. To learn more about our HFE services, visit our Human Factors Engineering page. Alternatively, get in touch to discuss how we could help with your new product or medical device development.