Patient Room Design Checklist and Evaluation Tool

Overview

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. We highly recommend an interdisciplinary and participative approach for using the tools in EBD process (see more details about the EBD process in the EDAC Study Guides). 

Get Organized

The checklists and POE tools are organized around 23 EBD goals (desirable healthcare outcomes impacted by building design). The tool provides design considerations and features that can help to achieve each EBD goal. They facilitate design decision-making, they ensure key evidence-based design elements are included in design stages, and they help to evaluate how well a patient room performs against key healthcare goals after construction and occupancy.
​ ​​ ​
Currently in downloadable Excel format, each tool includes three main parts:

• Cover page:  includes key instructions and guidelines of how to use the tools
• Home page: serves as a central hub for accessing the evaluation tabs for EBD goals, prioritizes EBD goals for a particular project, and instantly shows the results of the evaluation on one page.
• Evaluation tabs: lists design considerations and features that support the achievement of one EBD goal.

A list of key behaviors in a patient room by various users is included in a design checklist. The checklists and POE tools include several key features for ease of use:

• Tool customization based on relative importance of EBD goals
• Identification of research supported design features and hyperlinks to research evidence
• Indication of overlapping and potential trade-offs between individual design features with hyperlinks between overlapping/conflicting items

Note: The checklists are based on currently available research evidence and expert opinions therefore may not exhaustively cover all patient room design aspects impacting healthcare outcomes. The results produced by using the checklists may vary depending on conditions/users. 

Copyright 2015 The Center for Health Design. All Rights Reserved. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.