Insights & Solutions

Healthcare is provided in a variety of settings, from a person’s home to outpatient clinics, to the hospital. While the settings and specific design elements may differ across the continuum of care, the objectives of safety, efficiency, satisfaction, and high quality care remain constant. This set of interactive diagrams provides a link between the evidence base, design strategies, and desired outcomes – in a visually intuitive and actionable format.

The goal for this project was to design nurse servers and charting stations in patient rooms that would allow the caregivers to stay close to the patient’s bedside. By reducing the travel distance required to gather supplies and equipment and walk to the nurse station to chart, nurses would have more time to provide direct patient care.

Developed through extensive review of research, surveys, site tests, and review and validation by expert advisory council members, this standard set of evidence-based design checklists and post-occupancy evaluation (POE) tools can be used by interior designers to apply research to healthcare design projects and to conduct post-occupancy evaluations of three types of hospital patient rooms: adult medical-surgical, adult intensive care, and maternity care.

Hospital-acquired infections (HAI) and other easily transmittable diseases are a serious concern in most facilities today. Implementing some of the latest best practices in your physical environment can help to minimize their impact—and help you get the best outcomes from your efforts.

When exploring design options that can help to prevent HAI and keep other infectious diseases from spreading, here are three key factors to consider: