The Reassuring Nurse
Designing calm into one of the most stressful moments in healthcare.
Every night, many patients call out-of-hours primary care lines seeking reassurance, clarity, and help. But long wait times, language barriers, and high-pressure triage processes often leave them anxious, while nurses work under intense cognitive load, balancing empathy with strict medical protocols.
This project asks a simple question:
How might we give patients the comfort they need, without adding pressure to nurses who are already stretched thin?
Client: UMC Utrecht (concept project)
Role: Service Designer
Skills: Service blueprinting, user research, co-design, systems thinking, healthcare innovation
Impact Proof Point:
I turned journey mapping and emotional insight into a redesigned service flow that introduces a new reassurance role and pre-call app to reduce patient anxiety and nurse workload.
Overview
The Reassuring Nurse is a concept service for UMC Utrecht that reimagines the emotional and operational dynamics of out-of-hours primary care (OHS-PC).
By introducing a new role focused solely on reassurance and a lightweight pre-call app, the concept reduces patient stress and gives triage nurses the information and mental space they need to deliver safe, efficient care.
The result is a system where support begins the moment a patient reaches out, not ten minutes later.
Screens of the pre-call app.
Challenge
Out-of-hours healthcare is a high-stress environment for both patients and nurses. Through journey mapping, bodystorming, and expert conversations, several issues became clear:
Patients struggle to find the right number to call and face long waiting times.
Auto-messages are only in Dutch, excluding international residents.
The triage interface relies on rigid multiple-choice questions that hinder natural conversation.
Nurses shoulder a heavy emotional and administrative burden while being held legally responsible for outcomes.
The central tension:
Patients need emotional reassurance while nurses need cognitive clarity, and the current system offers neither.
Approach
Our process began with a Service Safari, experiencing the OHS-PC journey from a patient’s perspective. Mapping frustrations and peaks of anxiety helped identify the “moments of truth” where design could shift the experience from panic to reassurance.
We then used:
Journey mapping to capture the emotional arc of both patients and nurses
Bodystorming to simulate calls and expose system-level tensions
Expert discussions (with a triage nurse supervisor) to understand risks, workload, and feasibility
Insight synthesis to identify the root issues behind waiting times, emotional overload, and miscommunication
These insights shaped a concept that balances empathy with operational efficiency.
Redesigned customer journey illustrating the new service flow, from pre-call app input to immediate reassurance support and streamlined triage.
Concept: The Reassuring Nurse
The proposed service introduces a new role in the care chain and a simple pre-call application that captures essential information before the triage call begins.
The Reassurance Nurse
A professional dedicated solely to:
offering emotional support
calming anxiety during the waiting phase
giving clear expectations
escalating urgent cases if needed
They bridge the emotional gap that the current system leaves unaddressed.
The Pre-Call App
A lightweight digital touchpoint that allows patients to:
record symptoms via voice or text
upload photos/video if needed
switch between Dutch or English
connect wearable health data (e.g. vitals)
This helps triage nurses enter the call better informed and reduces the time needed to establish context.
Together, these two interventions create a more humane, balanced, and predictable OHS-PC experience.
Outcome
The Reassuring Nurse service flow offers clear benefits:
Reduced waiting anxiety through immediate human contact
Improved nurse performance by separating emotional labour from medical triage
Faster, more accurate calls thanks to pre-recorded information and data integration
Greater inclusivity through multilingual access
More resilience in the system by redistributing workload
The final deliverables included a service blueprint, redesigned journey, and prototype scenario illustrating the new interactions.
Impact
The Reassuring Nurse reframes patient care as a shared responsibility, recognising that emotional wellbeing is essential to clinical safety.
It demonstrates how service design can reveal overlooked forms of labour, like reassurance, and turn them into meaningful, structured support.
The concept shows that even small shifts in roles and workflow can create a calmer, more empathetic, and more efficient healthcare experience for everyone involved.