Redesign of Bedside Supply Carts to Improve Emergency Department Workflows: Mixed Methods Participatory Design

Emergency departments are often chaotic environments where delays can significantly impact patient care. Key items are stored in supply carts in or near patient rooms to promote efficiency and enable nurses to spend more time assisting patients. However, disorganization, lack of standardization, and lack of stocking can cause significant delays and negatively impact the quality of care.

This study utilized human-centered and participatory design to improve the workflow for supply acquisition in an emergency department.

Using a mixed methods, participatory design approach following the double diamond framework, the team worked with nursing staff and physicians in an urban emergency department to understand the root causes of frustrations with the current supply carts. Qualitative findings about bedside nursing workflows were integrated with quantitative observations of inventory and supply usage to drive a rapid-cycle prototyping process to optimize supply management in the bedside cart.

A lack of clinical staffing exacerbates preexisting challenges with restocking the medical supplies in the bedside carts. This problem is compounded by the misallocation of supplies, with high-frequency items underrepresented and low-frequency items overrepresented in the bedside carts. This leads to wastage of the seldom-used supplies and a lack of access to the most used supplies. The reorganization of the cart through co-design with nursing staff sped up supply acquisition by approximately 20% overall, tripled the availability of the most important supplies, and reduced the need for restocking from once per shift to once per 3 shifts, thus producing tangible improvements even within institutional limitations.

A participatory design process, using human factors principles in tandem with extensive input from end users, enables improvements to stocking. Implications for practice include (1) lack of easy access to appropriate supplies negatively impacts patient care and contributes to nurse burnout and frustration, (2) human factors engineering can improve access to patient care supplies through redesigning the layout of hospital supply carts to better align with workflows, and (3) co-design with frequent collaboration from stakeholders and end users ensures that solutions address the issues that matter most in a sustainable way.