Hand hygiene programs are crucial in preventing the spread of infection, but the dispensers we rely on have a myriad of hidden costs. Often overlooked is the fact that the wall-mounted hand sanitizing dispensers take a toll on facilities and are leading to unnecessary damage and waste over the life cycle of the building. How much? Let’s take a look at just one of these costs.
CC-BY-SA-3.0/Matt H. Wade at Wikipedia
If you need to know one thing about us, it’s that we are all about hand sanitizing stations. They are a key part of a complete hand hygiene promotion campaign that combines strong visual and textual communications with a physical design that attracts use; all of which both raises health literacy and keeps healthcare-associated infections at bay. Read more ›
One giant barrier to health communication is the fact that as you try to reach a broader and broader audience, the chances of them speaking the same language as you plummet. We simply can’t expect everyone to communicate in the exact same way – and misunderstandings can easily lead to harm. Read more ›
We just stumbled upon this slide show – it’s a summary of a project to standardize signage for infection control over a number of hospitals. The hospital system wanted to do so in order to reduce rates of multidrug-resistant infections and better meet CDC and state guidelines.
Then they make an observation that’s blindingly and stupefyingly obvious to us, but we have to give them credit as this is the first time we’ve heard a hospital system say it: Their signage is inconsistent in colour, design and wording, and this is a bad thing for many reasons. Read more ›
Red Cross poster circa WW 1 – art by Henry David Souter. Image in public domain.
Organizations in the United States and Canada have recently announced that their food safety regimes are “mutually formally recognized” as being “comparable” to each other, and this is huge news.
It says that such co-operation – the opposite of silo-thinking – is actually possible between countries, which is a radical idea in theory and rare in practice. But it’s happened! Read more ›
How you could have been browsing the internet today. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DEC_VT100_terminal.jpg
The field of computing has come a very long way. From basic, obscure academic theory in the 1940s to industry in the 1970s, and homes in the 1990s, they are used everywhere today – you probably have one in your pocket right now. This is massive growth, on par with the industrial revolution in scale, scope, and social influence.
Computing started out ugly and difficult to use. Of course it was – the early computer pioneers were mathematicians and engineers, not designers. The early command line operating systems use old teletype standards, measured in lines and characters. Computers were thought of as machines to calculate, tabulate and sort, so you didn’t need much more.
When the typesetting and printing field started using computers to speed up the process of creating press-ready output, they had to create many things from scratch. From their efforts, we get modern high-resolution display adapters, Postscript, and the first true fonts – three bits of software that together can display any style of lettering at any size. Most importantly, this not only worked for desktop publishing but had ramifications that changed computing forever. Read more ›
There are many things in this world that seem simple and understandable to the layperson, only to reveal their complexity and depth when studied on a more professional level.
You know a cold when you have one, and to most people that’s enough – a cold is a cold and you spend a few days in bed with a warm cup-o-soup. To a doctor, your cold isn’t just a cold. It’s probably one of a large family of rhinoviruses, each with their own particular effects – a distinction that many consider academic at best, like telling the difference between wasps and bees. It could also be a case of influenza, which shares certain symptoms and matters a lot more, especially to the young or elderly.
Visual design is another field that is deeper than many give it credit for. Read more ›
Yesterday was the fifth of May, which is the World Health Organization’s yearly celebration and promotion of hand hygiene and its role in saving lives.
What a day it was! There were a great many photos of healthcare workers and policy people shared on Instagram and Twitter, each of them holding a printout of the hashtag #safeHANDS, and adding their collective energy to the proceedings. All told, it went swimmingly for all who were involved with organizing it.
There were also teleclasses and webinars held on various subjects – one featured a retrospective on the past year in the WHO 5 Moments campaign (which has been globally successful), a look at the challenges in Afghanistan’s hospital system, and perhaps most interesting to us a look at what works and what doesn’t for promoting hand hygiene.
That particular presentation is up on Youtube, and we’ve queued it up here to the part we find most fascinating.
It sounds exactly like one of our “Healthcare Graphics Need Help” columns, doesn’t it? Read more ›
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” -Benjamin Franklin
Despite the truth in the above adage, with a few exceptions (vaccines being one of the few) preventative measures are not prioritized in healthcare in favour of fast-acting cures. This is true of mental health, cardiac health and particularly infection prevention, which ironically has the word in its very name. Read more ›
Visual communication is difficult, especially if you aren’t steeped in it every day like we are. So difficult in fact that once again we’re using a communication from the venerable Centers for Disease Control:
Today we’re talking about communicating through symbols and the importance of matching your visuals with your message – which this poster does not do. Now, that’s not to say that the information in the poster is bad. The content itself is good and very important to share if a bit wordy, but even the best campaigns can get derailed by poor visuals. Read more ›
Recent Comments