Insights & Solutions

This tool provides healthcare designers and professionals with ideas on how to improve nurse-patient communication through facility design.

Learn about: elements of the built environment that improve nurse-patient communication; design interventions that could improve nurse-patient communication as found in the literature; how to ask better questions surrounding this critical relationship during your next project.

While discussion of facility design and healthcare reform often focuses on the patient experience of noise and cleanliness as measured by the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey, design is also a factor in reform-based outcome targets.  

Healthcare reform has continually focused on several aspects of the patient experience. The patient experience domain (as measured through HCAHPS — the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) includes three metrics that are used to evaluate patient perceptions about communication: doctor-patient, nurse-patient, and communication surrounding medications.

The following are compiled from research literature, case studies, interviews, and other materials to provide an overview on the topic of noise.  

Learn about: the contribution technologies made to improve patient outcomes, the use of multiple technologies to improve patient care, and the strategies used by the design team to avoid creating a solitary feeling for the nurses working in a decentralized configuration. 

This tool provides healthcare designers and professionals with ideas on how to address the issue of noise in facility design.