Isobar presents at TEDGlobal in Rio de Janeiro

Last week Isobar presented at TED’s global conference, TEDGlobal in Rio Di Janeiro, sharing its partnership with Monash Health addressing infection control in hospitals and how they are working on solutions to improve it. The presentation was made in the same week Isobar was named in BRW’s top 50 Most Innovative Australian Companies for 2014.

Isobar’s work with the Monash Health is around improving the global issue of hospital infection control. In the US alone, every year up to two million patients acquire an infection whilst in hospitals, and of those nearly 100,000 die. In Australia that translates to an estimated 7,000 deaths each year.1 It is estimated that somewhere between 40-60% of cases are picked up through staff’s hands.

For the past year, Isobar has been working in collaboration with Donald Campbell, director of general medicine at Monash Health, looking at how they can get staff to wash their hands more diligently. They have conducted research in the hospital and workshopped problems and solutions with the medical staff to try and solve the problem.

Says Campbell: “This is a global issue that gets a lot of attention, but we wanted to try a different approach, by trying to solve this problem through design. The initial findings of this work have been really powerful.

“This work is leading to some really interesting solutions, and I’m really excited about the process. The hospital staff have never been involved in a process like this and they are really enthusiastic about it. I really believe our work with Isobar will lead us to a great result.”

Says Tim Evans, who has lead the work on this project at Isobar: “We’ve taken our time to understand all the challenges that the staff face on a day-to-day basis by doing research inside hospitals. Then we ran workshops with them to generate ideas as to how we could solve the challenges.”

TED’s purpose of ‘Ideas worth sharing’ is aligned with Isobar’s ‘Ideas without limits’ and being recognised by TED for this work is an excellent achievement.

The solutions that have come as a result of this research range from the highly technical through to simple process and structural changes aimed at changing everyday behaviours.

Simon Small (pictured), Isobar’s executive strategy director presented the work on behalf of the project team and the talk will be published later this year.

1 Alliance of Aging Research