Mapping Clinical Recovery Pathways
2021 has been a productive year for the NOVELL team. Among our many achievements this year, we started working on clinical recovery pathway mapping and we hope to complete this in 2022.
One of the key goals of NOVELL is to optimize stroke recovery using evidence-based design and technology. As anyone who has worked on a complex project before will know, one of the key challenges of this kind of work is getting everybody on the same page. To do this, it is crucial that different experts from healthcare, design, policy, economic, and lived-experience backgrounds are coming to our conversations with a shared understanding of what existing research and guidelines say about rehabilitation processes and facilities. We have developed this process in NOVELL by mapping clinical pathways.
We’re inviting you to contribute to this process at the bottom of this page.
Mapping the stroke recovery journey
Everybody’s stroke recovery journey is different. But, when we are looking at the patterns of activities and events that take place, and the spaces where these things happen, there are strong patterns that tend to be followed.
Although we can never capture every individual’s experience, a typical stroke recovery process can be depicted as a pathway that survivors are likely to move along from their admission to a rehabilitation unit to their discharge home. The Clinical Pathway Maps help our team to visualise the experience of a stroke survivor, including the people they meet, the processes they are taken through, the spaces they use, and the resources that are needed to support them during their stay in rehabilitation.
For the NOVELL Redesign project, the Clinical Pathway Maps are very useful to see the types of interactions that occur between people, technology, and spaces in a rehabilitation unit. As we continue our mapping, we are planning to add more detail about the kinds of spaces where activities take place; and to explore the experience of different phenotypes (fictional personas that are constructed based on real-world stroke recovery data).
So far, these pathways maps have provided critical insights into the following key questions:
What does a common day look like during stroke recovery?
What hospital spaces are used during stroke recovery (i.e., from admission to discharge)?
Which physical and human resources are necessary to complete each recovery phase?
What are the gaps in current clinical and design guidelines and how can we best fill these gaps?
Where to next?
In 2022, our team at NOVELL hopes to finish conversations with policy, economic, design, and clinical stakeholders to agree on a common map that will best represent and guide rehabilitation. These maps will then be tested with stroke survivors and other key stakeholders to gather further feedback, insights, and validation.
As we continue to add to these maps, our team is having important conversations about how we might overlay and/or integrate various research knowledge, design guidelines, and other resources. We’re also interested in any thoughts that you, our community of co-researchers, think should be included in these maps. So, rather than waiting until we formally start engaging with you, please feel free to leave some comments, ideas, or suggestions on the draft version of the map below, or in the comments section at the bottom of the page. Because these are being shared as a draft and a work in progress, please do not share these without checking with the team first at novellredesign@florey.edu.au.
Tip: Use full screen mode to view more of the map at once – When you hover your mouse over the zoom buttons, a ‘full screen’ icon will appear.