Creativity and Naturalistic Decision-Making in Emergency Departments: Evolving in Service Design

Little is known about creativity and service design in emergency departments (ED). To gain insight, we developed an integrative framework, specifically in the context of creativity, intuition theories, design discourse, and naturalistic decision-making. We reframed our research construct within complex phenomena. We created coherent, comprehensible categories such as intuition, motivation, dynamic conditions, and the possibility to adjust. We explored whether creativity is a fundamental building block for designing services that satisfy both patients and health-care workers. To do this, we developed a questionnaire with specific decision-making situations in emergency departments and conducted a survey of 149 staff. The results show that staff consider creativity in decision-making situations to be very important, but that creativity does not lead to good services and processes in emergency departments. Creativity can be seen as a building block that can be used to improve the ED experience, but without the necessary knowledge and training, ED staff will be left alone, and creativity will diminish over time.