Insights & Solutions

This webinar will present an overview of the Legacy Emanuel Medical Center garden research project. For this project, The Center for Health Design awarded Legacy Health and Quatrefoil, Inc. its 2018 Evidence-Based Design Touchstone Award at the highest Platinum Level. Attendees will gain an understanding of the impact of an evidence-based design (EBD) process to create a hospital garden to reduce stress in three different user groups, learn the positive effects of a garden on different hospital populations, and see how the garden is used in daily programming to serve all hospital populations.

Learn about the capacity of a virtual nature experience to significantly reduce stress, reduce anxiety, and increase pleasure, and treatment strategies that provide hope of reducing pharmacologic interventions and of improving quality of life for individuals with dementia and the staff who care for them.

Learn about how the design of a new psychiatric facility strives to normalize mental illness through carefully chosen materials with the goal of creating a “homey,” non-institutional setting, why private patient rooms will be included in the new final building as an important part of the design concept, and how research helped shape the architects’ beliefs that the built environment should support patients’ dignity and independence as part of the recovery process.

Learn about how a county directive to relocate different behavioral health programs into one location led to a unique design for serving low to high-risk populations in an integrated facility, and how collaboration among the architect, interior designer, landscape architect, owner, staff, and clients played an integral role in shaping the programming and design.

As part of the Behavioral & Mental Health toolbox, in this issue brief you will learn about the prevalence of behavioral and mental health conditions as comorbidities; design strategies for promoting psychological wellness; and a systematic benefit analysis approach to meet the psychological needs of all.

This webinar introduces the new, easier to use, online interface for The Center’s Safety Risk Assessment (SRA) toolkit, a proactive and systematic approach to designing and renovating healthcare facilities for safety. Originally developed through research and consensus to support the requirements of the FGI Guidelines, The Center's research team will walk you through the why, what, and how of each part of the online SRA toolkit illustrating features with vignettes gathered from the testing process.  

Learn about: How to think big when building small; how a smaller environment can benefit residents and caregivers; and SAGE and its mission to unite industry leaders, healthcare providers, and consultants.

Built environment strategies can help healthcare organizations and communities promote healthy living, reduce obesity, and prevent chronic disease. Given the increasing focus on community health and preventive medicine, it is important that healthcare organizations and the communities they serve incorporate built environment strategies that result in healthy behavior.

With support from the Kresge Foundation, The Center for Health Design has developed a standardized Community Health Center Facility Evaluation tool that supports design for population health. The tool is intended to support both design and post-occupancy evaluation of built projects with respect to population health goals.

This tool is meant to support a universal design approach to environments for aging populations. 

As part of the noise toolbox, in this issue brief you will learn about how excessive noise can negatively impact patients and staff in the hospital environment, ways to improve patients’ perception of sound, and low-cost, medium-cost, and high-cost design strategies that can reduce noise.