Heals on Wheels - A Sustainable Development Goal.

For our week five lecture, we were mysteriously asked to meet outside a building we never normally have lectures in with absolutely no explanation on the reasoning. We were led to a building none of us had taken much notice of before and to our surprise it was the Black Box Studios from Johnson and Johnson. Blackbox is a strategic design studio and they apply their strategic design process to concepts that are committed to creating s positive social impact. They generously hosted a 4hour design sprint for the evening and gave us a brief run through of their company. Initially, I was surprised at how young they all were to be the core group in a company and it helped alleviate my fears of being stuck at a desk, doing nothing but sharpening pencils and delivering coffees to a bunch of balding men in suits when I graduate.

We were tasked with a brief to create a start-up company that was environmentally friendly and had a positive social impact in four hours. Oh, and present our ideas to the company director Dragons Den style. No biggie… First, we had to divide ourselves into groups of four and dish out the roles in the company such as CEO and CTO. We had a few minutes to negotiate these positions before choosing our sustainable development goal. The time restrictions were both stressful and exhilarating, I found we worked surprisingly well under the pressure. We chose Good Health and Wellbeing as our sustainable development goal. This seemed like an obvious choice as there is such an array of areas in the health industry in this country that need changing, from the lack of beds to the waiting lists. We worked in a group to ideate the problem areas and think of a potential solution. Our ideas ranged from Safe Injection clinics for drug users who want to get clean, to free environmentally friendly feminine hygiene products, to updating the Sexual and Mental Health and Wellbeing education in schools and third level institutions. Our chosen idea was entitled “Heals on Wheels”.

The aim of the development is to provide essential healthcare facilities to people around the country especially those in rural Ireland. We planned to make a mobile Cancer clinic to reduce the painstaking travelling to big scary Dublin hospitals undergone by hundreds if not thousands of people daily. The aim would be to transport the equipment and the necessary healthcare professionals in large renovated vehicles that have been retired from service, ie old ambulances, trucks and school busses and bring the clinic to the patients. The clinics would travel to all of the major and minor towns throughout the country. This would reduce the number of individuals travelling to hospitals daily, freeing up parking spaces and beds, reducing costs of parking and fuel and removing the need for long haul travelling after grueling cancer treatment. The projects future projections aim to include mobile Dialysis units, and Cardiac clinics. I find this especially relevant as I am from Waterford where our cardiac clinic is only open 9-5 Monday to Friday. In other word’s if you have a heart attack outside of the hours convenient for our politicians you can either hope the helicopter will get you to Cork asap or you die. We also planned to introduce delivery of prescriptions to patients in remote areas by drone.

We were the first to deliver our pitch to the group and were very happy with the feedback. In the current state with a world pandemic at our doors I think this kind of project would be a huge aid to this crisis. It is viruses like these that remind us of how human we are and how at the end of the day there is no stopping this virus, it does not care if you are white, black , gay, straight, muslim, catholic or atheist, it will infect you either way. Neither does cancer or any other illness suffered by the people of this country. Our team have, in my opinion, come up with a pretty good solution to a nasty problem that many families face every day. I can only imagine the positives that could come out of it, if our doodles were put into action.