I went into final year with a good idea of projects that I wanted to do and the different areas that I am interested in and have experience with. I wanted to design something that would have a positive impact on others and have an input into healthcare as this is something I am very passionate about. I have always been surrounded in healthcare as my older brother, Ashley, was born with cerebral palsy. Over the years I have experience hospitals, respite centres, day centres and home care, which means I have experienced the good and the bad. However, the one thing that made me realise more needs to be done to ease communication was when my granda became ill and was in and out of hospital during his last seven months. I was balancing university, my part time job, caring for Ashley, running to and from the hospital and attempting (and failing) at having any sort of a life. Them seven months taught me that communication caused a lot of my stress and a lot of my concerns, this was due to me having to go to the hospital everyday, sometimes twice a day, to get information. Due to the low staffing levels the phone was rarely answered and staff just didn’t have the time to come and talk to me, not because they didn’t want to, because they physically did not have the resources to be able to.

I started to work as a care assistant in the January after my granda passed away and I noticed that the issues I had were very common. I was being asked simple questions about food intake, if they slept well and also that they didn’t know that they needed something brought up. I started to wonder how can we know everything about our friends and what they are doing due to social media updates and communication at our fingertips, yet we cannot find out what is happening with someone in care? I thought about an application that eased communication between family, friends, care assistants and the client.

I had other ideas, although the idea of bringing communication into care was one that I felt so passionately about that I thought it was the one I should focus on. You can read about my other ideas on my blog post dedicated to them. I started to get a feel of why I was doing this and the fact that it was an issue that was person to me, yet a major problem for so many others gave me a driving force. I looked at the various pros and cons for each idea, also states these in detail in my other blog post, and I am going into week two with a solid idea of what I want to do.