See You Soon, Laerdal!

Laerdal Wrap up day

Materials and selection processes:

The fourth and final day at Laerdal started with a 1 hour session on "Materials and selection processes" with two people from Laerdal's material and sourcing team. They are responsible for making the material choices for all Laerdal products during the Industrialisation phase. This Material team starts interacting with the design team from the very early stages of design and development of a product. Laerdal has a huge list of 17 polymer families for rubber and silicone to choose from to suit the various requirements of the product. 

Soon, they took examples of Laerdal products to explain how did they end up choosing a particular material. For example, the case of Neonatalie was discussed in detail to show us the materials choices. Initially PVC sheet was chosen for the baby's material and it had couple of issues after the launch. The material was not having enough impact strength and the joints were tearing when users used to accidentally drop the baby filled with water. Also, the material chosen initially was reacting with water and having chemical reactions due to the use with water. Once Laerdal came to know about these issues, they had to choose a new material to substitute with the old material, PVC. When choosing a new material they had to keep in mind many criteria. The material needs to be available for sourcing, it should serve the functional requirements of the product and also should be cost effective for the product cost to be optimal. Taking all these factors into consideration, the Laerdal's material team chose TPU or Thermoplastic Polyurethane that had high impact strength to avoid neonatalie breakage when dropped accidentally.

Similarly, they also discussed the material choices made for the resuscitator,  both the single time use and multiple use versions. One of the driving criteria for choosing an appropriate material  for the re-usable version was the inertness to very high temperature taking into account the practices of users in developing nations. The final material chosen was of high quality and can withstand heating, auto-claving and other local cleaning practices.

Call with LGH- India team:

After the materials session, we had a long call with the LGH India team to show their field visits in India, Ethiopia that was carried out few months back. The field visits was about attending the training sessions for Mamanatalie. Sonakshi from LGH India team conducted the field visit in Lucknow and Jenny from LGH Norway conducted the field visit in Ethiopia. Both of them went about the process they followed in conducting field visits and shared the findings from the visits. The presentation contained pictures and call outs.They also talked about creating user personas around the data collected from the field. Once the presentations were done, Pushkar gave some information on the field visit and asked if any doubts are there to be clarified.

Interview Guide questionnaire review
The interview guide questions were reviewed with Cansu from Laerdal to edit some of the questions.It was a 2-hr long session and was very useful with Tore Inge going through the dos and donts of an interview.

Cansu and Tor Inge review our interview guides

Closing comments from Laerdal
Later the day towards the evening, Tore Laerdal, Tore Inge, Cansu and Jenny gave the closing comments before going into the trip. The CBID team thanked the Laerdal team for hosting them for 4 days and adding great value to the team's understanding and work material.

Thanks to everyone that made us feel so welcome at Laerdal!