Healthcare Design - April 2015 - 20

A
V

HC

0 5
,

G

CO

C THE CENTER | 04.15

b g t
ideas

Lady Cilento
Children's Hospital
Bi b
A
lia

Removing barriers
The Center for Health Design is rolling out new tools to help
designers navigate the complexities of healthcare research
By Debra Levin

SCAN TO RENEW/
SUBSCRIBE

Custom
Reprints
Help your company
stand out among the
rest. More than mere
photocopies, reprints
are customized, highquality printed and digital
replications of original
editorial or featured
coverage of your company,
product and/or service.
Here are some ways
reprints can be used:
t Sales and marketing
materials
t Direct mail enclosures
t New product
announcements
tRecruitment and
education
t Trade show handouts
t Brand awareness and
identity
t E-mail campaigns
For more information and
to order your reprints,
please contact:
Elana Ben-Tor
216-373-1202
elana.bentor@
emeraldexpo.com
20

HCDmagazine.com 04.15

It's no secret that a well-designed built environment plays a critical role in keeping patients safe and enhancing the quality of care.
Though there is a growing body of research
that supports the role of design in health
outcomes, oftentimes the
research is very technical in nature and difficult

healthcare facilities and created collaboratively by The Center's research team, with
input from an international group of industry
advisers, to ensure they're user friendly and
scientifically valid.

The new evidence-based tools focus on
patient rooms in three acute care
environments: medical/surgical, intensive
care, and maternity care.

for design practitioners to
understand, interpret, and
apply to their projects.
The research team at
The Center realized that a
major barrier to translating this research into
actionable decision-making was the lack of
design and evaluation tools that are based
on research and yet are also easy to use and
readily available.
And that's why, three years ago, The
Center approached the American Society
of Interior Designers (ASID) Foundation and
requested a multiyear grant to find a solution
to this problem. Since then, with the support
of ASID, The Center has been developing
a series of evidence-based interior design
checklists and post-occupancy evaluation
tools to help the design and healthcare communities better understand the role that the
design of the physical environment plays in
achieving specific and measurable outcomes
in patient room settings.
The result of that work is three new
evidence-based tools that design and healthcare professionals can use to apply research
findings to healthcare design projects and
to conduct post-occupancy evaluations of
patient spaces. They're focused on three
acute care environments: medical/surgical
patient rooms, intensive care patient rooms,
and maternity care patient rooms. (Find the
tools at http://bit.ly/1Gxjj76.)
An interior design checklist helps design
professionals optimize the design stage of
a project, while a patient room evaluation
tool can be used to assess whether a room
meets functional goals and design intent.
Each was tested and validated at various

Also available are checklists of key behaviors that might occur in a patient room based
on the various users of the space, enabling
design teams to easily consider all facets of
the environment. The checklists are customizable based on the relative importance of a
project's evidence-based design goals and
help users identify the available research that
supports a specific design feature, allowing a
comparison of design features to evaluate and
select the best ones to meet project goals.
The next step for this work, made possible
through funding support from the Donghia
Foundation, will be creating a set of five interactive annotated diagrams of the three patient
room types as well as medical office building
spaces, retail health environments, and home
healthcare spaces. These diagrams, available
in summer 2016, will demonstrate appropriate,
high-quality designs for each space and present design strategies that can be implemented
to improve
outcomes. HCD
Debra Levin
is president
and CEO of
The Center for
Health Design.
She can be
reached at
dlevin@health
design.org.

Debra Levin
http://www.bit.ly/1Gxjj76 http://www.design.org http://www.HCDmagazine.com
Healthcare Design - April 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Healthcare Design - April 2015
