Blood buddies. Fostering international blood donation at universities in China

Donating blood is simple, safe and it saves lives, but only 5% of the population that can donate actually do so. The need for blood is increasing every year and in many countries, including China. The supply can not cover the demand and make sufficient blood available, while also ensuring its quality and safety. A donation of 400ml can save up to 3 lives and blood products help patients suffering from life-threatening conditions to live longer and maintain a higher quality of life. Additionally, it supports complex medical and surgical procedures. Transfusion has an essential, life-saving role in maternal and child care and during the times of human caused and natural disasters, such as the recent earthquakes in Nepal. However most of the people don’t donate for several reasons, from lack of awareness to the fear of needles. The World Health Organization (WHO) launched this year’s campaign with the theme "Thank you for saving my life". It highlights stories from people whose lives have been saved through blood donation, as a way of motivating people and regular blood donors to continue giving blood. Shanghai is the place where change can happen. Chosen as host city of this year’s world donor day, the city offers the opportunity to redesign the system among its international population. Universities can play a leading role due to the double challenge: involving more and more students in blood donation and promoting a healthy lifestyle among them, which is a necessary condition for good blood. The final aim is to encourage and empower students to take more responsibility for their own health and well-being, even before taking care of others. Redesigning the blood donation system starting from Tongji university gives me the opportunity to put what I have learnt into practice, to apply the acquired knowledge to the context I live in. I started getting involved in blood donation 6 years ago, when at the age of 18 I became a blood donor in my home town. Once I moved to Shanghai I was not considering the possibility of keeping donating blood here until I met TJ Hands. TJ Hands is the international club of Healthcare of Tongji university who take care of different projects for the safety and the health of students, and one of these is Blood donation. They have been organizing and promoting international blood donations in the last three years, but the issues to be solved are still a lot. This gives me the opportunity to deal with blood donations no more and not only as donor, but as a designer, putting my skills and my tools into the service of a topic I care. I will bring my expertise and my personal experience with blood donation in the international context of Chinese universities. The biggest challenge will be learning to see things from other people’s perspectives and to be able to quickly understand the system that does not work in the way I am used to. How can we foster free, regular and international blood donations starting from Tongji university? How can we design an efficient, simple and immediate service to increase and encourage blood donations among international students? And how can we promote healthy lifestyles as necessary condition for young and good blood among university students? To answer these questions my thesis will apply the Product Service System Design (PSSD) approach and its constantly evolving methods and tools to understand users’ needs, build courage to envision new solutions and facilitate co-operation to make it happen. PSSD can be considered as the physical evidence of abstract concepts: the design of experiences, solutions and strategies means to design several different material or immaterial elements through which these concepts come into reality. Products, communication strategies, services, products and spaces are designed in an integrated way to offer comprehensive, ethical solutions to complex demands. The center of the product-service-system is the people (users, suppliers, employees, or stakeholders in general) who interact with all these multiple design components. The context of blood donation at Chinese universities offers the possibility of developing a holistic, integrated process to redesign the system, through interdisciplinary methods and tools, developing new integrated solutions, implementing the communication strategy, designing the services and the interactions between the various stakeholders involved, as well as the products and the spaces where the encounters will take place. The final project, prototyped and tested locally at Tongji university, is aiming to be a new starting point for blood donation on a larger scale. My thesis aims to be a model of service system that can be adapted and applied in other universities of Shanghai and in all China, following the guidelines which lead the project. To develop a toolkit able to promote blood donation around China, I will first collect knowledge and inspiration from case studies of design for Healthcare taken from my home country and abroad. The change to more patient-centered healthcare is happening all over the world, providing unique opportunities to work among various cultures, situations and environments. One major element of the patient-centered vision is to effectively receive and handle patient opinions and comments. After all, it’s through users voices that true opportunities for improvement can be identified. "People are setting higher and higher service experience expectations, as a result of exposure to great service offerings that revolve around them in industries outside of healthcare. (...) To find guidance in designing people-centered offerings, health systems must look beyond their own ecosystems." (Kate Dudgeon). Experience-based design (EBD) is a methodology which helps front-line health teams to work with users in order to identify and make service improvements, based on observations and a collective reflection about people’s experiences. Here is where the project of my thesis takes its strength: the encounter between theory and praxis, methods developed on field, studied and implemented through experiences, focusing on people and their interactions. The final aim is to improve and foster blood donation among, for and with people, encouraging and empowering them to take more responsibility for their own health and well-being.