What happens in fifteen minutes

And that's thanks to Ana Elisa Loynaz and María Fernanda Bolaños. Fourth-year students design (accredited specialization service design ) at the School of Architecture, they had the opportunity to do an internship with the CUN in the summer of 2025. During their internship, they developed a guide El guide Buen Cuidado(The Guide to Good Care) so that doctors working in the department could provide patients and their families with a sense of calm, which is difficult to achieve when dealing with topic sensitive topic . 

The School of Empathy

The guide actually the result of multiple lessons in empathy and proactive listening. However, the learning that Ana Elisa and María Fernanda gained from this vulnerable and delicate environment required them to be able to respond immediately: they quickly learned the art of speaking, interviewing, and asking the right questions, in the right place, and with the right sensitivity. "We had to take up their time, observe, ask questions, without being invasive. And also, detect problems to improve the department, when nobody likes to be told that something is not working well," Ana Elisa acknowledges.

The person who entrusted them with the work Javier Antón, a professor at the School of Architecture, who taught them theDesign Studio subject in their first year. Since then, the professor continued to be involved in various projects undertaken by the students, but no longer in the classroom, rather as advisor.

"We practically lived in the department. We had scrubs, attended consultations, and observed everything: spaces, routes, gestures, silences," recalls María Fernanda, as she uses her hands to list and gradually reconstruct her experience during a month and a half, from May to mid-July. From nine in the morning, when they entered the hospital, they devoted themselves to shadowing; that is, becoming the constant shadow of the doctors in their daily work. In this way, they were able to identify several problems that they could work on, using tools other than needles or stethoscopes. These findings were categorized into four different sections: spatial, human, logistical, and technical. For the most part, they detected areas for improvement in the spatial and logistical sections. "In attention patient attention , we found almost nothing that needed to be changed. The doctors do a wonderful job," says Ana Elisa, opening the guide show the different diagrams she has drawn and summarized.

Both explain that, in order to better understand the experience at the Clinic, they decided to emulate some of the moments of treatment that patients go through. María Fernanda recounts how she identified a specific problem with the spatial distribution of some rooms when, following the same route that patients take to the scanner machines, she took off her clothes and walked from the changing room to the conference room wearing only a thin surgical gown. "I put on the gown myself and walked the route to understand how uncomfortable it was. If it was uncomfortable for me, it must be even more so for a patient who repeats this 15 times."

In their efforts to identify ways in which the clinic could improve care, they also spoke with dozens of patients: both those who were still undergoing treatment and those who had already overcome the disease. "People tell us what to do. Those who really identify the problem and the solution are those who live the experience," says Ana Elisa, while looking knowingly at her colleague. Among the many interviews they conducted, two stand out. The first was with the sister of a mutual friend who had just been diagnosed, which allowed them to follow her treatment from the beginning. The second was with a woman who helped them understand the real stress a person faces when, during a enquiry , they receive a complex, uncertain, and difficult-to-assimilate diagnosis. "If the doctors tell me to stand on my head, I stand on my head," she told them. Their trust in doctors is blind and absolute.

From theory to practice

"We come from a creative world and entered a very fast-paced and structured medical environment," explains Ana Elisa. And as she does so, she sighs, as the difference between professional disciplines required an enormous effort on her part. The process of understanding the context, collecting data, recognizing areas for improvement, devising proposals, and illustrating them in a simple way involved work for the two students. It was a double challenge: understanding, on the one hand, and making others understand, on the other. Their mentor, Antón, met with them every afternoon to help them put into words all the information they had identified in the hospital corridors.

Finally, they structured the guide in phases. One phase covers all their backstage work , i.e., the observation process and the period in which they got to know the hospital team. This was followed by the front stage phase, in which they found different insights or key ideas from the interviews. They also mention the so-called pain points, which, based on "intangible" complaints or discomforts, enabled them to structure a path of priorities with which to continue their research. Finally, there was the co-design phase, in which they presented the instructions so far to the patients. They sought to have these concepts confirmed or denied by those who, when exposed to the various tests, formed an opinion that they did not understand until they read it. And with that, they finally proposed possible solutions that would make reality a less cold experience.

As result the design processes, various core topic proposals were developed core topic enquiry the fifteen-minute enquiry less stressful experience. One of them, for example, agreed upon for short-term implementation, involves the position and shape of the tables in the enquiry rooms. The team determined that square tables gave the impression of separating patients from the doctor, creating two physical and psychological spaces and two very different hierarchies. Another element they considered was the lighting, as it was perceived as intense and annoying in the basement, and they decided to replace it with non-white LED lighting. In addition, to engage patients emotionally, they devised a new ritual: giving a rose to those who complete chemotherapy. This financial aid gesture financial aid symbolically close a difficult chapter.

Desire to learn

Ana Elisa and María Fernanda talk about their degree program a design branch of design , but design that has fascinated them both. It is a topic among senior students, constantly wondering what they will do the following year, what will become of them when they no longer have to set foot in a classroom. Both share the opinion that doing internships during their degree program has helped degree program to have clearer preferences about their professional future and has shown them that after graduation there is still room for learning.

In any case, they recommend that other students who have not yet ventured to start their internships should do so. To live the experience and continue learning.

Who knows, that learning may be rewarded with fifteen minutes that are much more bearable.