Warm Solutions: Centering Nurse Contributions in Medical Making

Abstract

Making medical devices in healthcare settings engages practitioners in organizational innovation. Nurses improvise physical workarounds at the bedside in response to patient needs. Yet nurse-led problem-solving is rarely centralized in an emerging innovation ecosystem through medical making. We interviewed medical makers in six healthcare makerspaces to understand factors for nurse inclusion in the medical making ecosystem. Findings from 16 multi-stakeholder interviews with 6 facilitators and 10 nurses in the USA, reveal insights into nurse-led problem-solving with and without the use of physical prototyping (making) in formal innovation spaces with maker technologies. We report how a nurse's capacity for making is practice-driven to address in-patient discomfort, repair their own practice, and update standardized workflows. Most nurses iterate on low-tech solutions facing barriers to formal collaboration when they attempt to scale up. Their technical capabilities extend from innovation-centered resources (e.g., lab spaces, technologies), often with complete reliance on facilitators who have limited authority in the medical system. We contribute to themes around practice-based innovation, participation in technology design, and articulation work for collaborative innovation. From nurse makers' experiences, we discuss how nurse participation can be supported in healthcare technology design.