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Insights & Solutions

Tool
March 2020 Tool

Understanding the personal abilities and unique challenges faced by aging individuals, especially those living with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, better equips design teams to create supportive care and living spaces. Changes that can be credited to dementia are noticeably different from the changes typical of normal aging, but both can occur at the same time. 

Design Strategies
March 2020 Design Strategies

Understanding the personal abilities and unique challenges faced by aging individuals, especially those living with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, better equips design teams to create supportive living spaces. Devising goals that target single symptoms and objectives is not always practical, however, because changes associated with aging, Alzheimer’s disease, and other dementias tend to appear in “clusters” rather than in isolation. The design-based evidence associated with designing supportive memory care settings results in 12 programmatic design strategies.

Executive Summary
February 2020 Executive Summary

Learn about: the personal abilities and unique challenges faced by aging individuals, including those living with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, how thoughtful design can reduce stress associated with declining physical abilities, memory loss, and care provision.

Webinar
July 2019 Webinar

This webinar will examine the Behavioral Health Crisis Stabilization Unit as a case study, including direct outcomes achieved by the project. Since opening, the unit has had a positive effect on the ED, lessening mental health patients in the ED and decreasing the psychiatric inpatient admission rates for patients.

Webinar
July 2019 Webinar

This webinar will discuss some of the common challenges witnessed and used to develop the testing methods – with a focus on ligature performance and robustness.  Hear about their learnings about doors and windows which feature so highly with sentinel events that they needed their own category of testing.   Review key areas of risk within mental health environments and lessons learned about managing risk in reality.    

Webinar
June 2019 Webinar

This webinar will review two case studies of built behavioral health areas within existing emergency department. We will provide an in-depth look at the materials, products and systems developed to provide safe and durable environments with special attention given to anti- ligature and durability.

Webinar
June 2019 Webinar

This webinar explores the strategies and cost implications of a human-centered approach to design that leverages tangible and intangible elements to strengthen staff-patient connections, facilitate innovations, and create a safer place for behavioral health care.

Webinar
December 2018 Webinar

This webinar explores how MedStar Health is using fast-track design to help catalyze a new model of behavioral health, using the reduction of barriers, small house concepts and interior design strategies to create positive environments where patients are positively impacted. 

Webinar
October 2018 Webinar

This webinar explores how out of a vision from renowned child psychiatrist and human geneticist Dr. Matthew State, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Child, Teen & Family Center and Department of Psychiatry Building will be the first-ever UCSF facility for both pediatric and adult psychiatric patients and one of the first facilities in the U.S. to integrate the neurosciences with traditional psychiatry for child, adolescent and adult patient populations. 

Interview
February 2018 Interview

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.