Insights & Solutions

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. 

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. 

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.

This Clinic Design Post Occupancy Evaluation Toolkit is self-administered and provides a way to collect a variety of data on the physical enviornment, subjective perception of users, and objective healthcare outcomes.

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.