Increasing Coordination within a Maternity Ward through a CSCW-based Approach

Hospital emergency environments are dynamic and hard to manage. They require coordination across several healthcare professionals. Such team members with different cultures, roles and skills have to work together. In this paper, we describe a field study which is a maternity ward. We studied the way under which team members collaborate, how coordination breakdowns occur, and how different conflicts may happen. The following sections outline design concepts of our collaborative planning system. We discuss the possibilities offered by new technological developments in the area of web application such as Web 2.0 and how to introduce them to improve the collaboration process.