Annette Roehl, M.Arch, MUP, BSN-RN, CCRN, CHSE, EDAC, MHFA, nurse and healthcare facilities design strategist, Froedtert ThedaCare Health (Milwaukee)
Holding degrees in nursing, architecture, and urban planning, Annette Roehl leverages extensive inpatient care experience to advance space solutions that prioritize quality, operational sustainability, and wellness for patients, families, and staff.
Furthermore, as a healthcare simulationist, she incorporates education, trauma-informed principles, high-reliability behaviors, and participants as experts into simulation-based clinical systems testing programs (SbCST). This ensures that facility design reflects the most current frontline perspectives and real-world experiences of patients, families, and care teams at the point of care.
Over the past year, she’s worked with the organization’s leadership on the Froedtert Hospital expansion in Wauwatosa, Wis., a project that includes a new patient tower, lobby, and parking structure designed to support growth and transform care delivery for the community. Throughout the project, Roehl consistently partnered with design and construction teams to evaluate every decision through three distinct lenses: patient, family, and staff experiences.
Specifically, she engaged many of the organization’s subject matter experts in a series of town hall-style workshops, surveys, patient intercepts, room mock-ups, and product evaluations to gather input from staff, patients, and community members. The process resulted in tangible design changes, including dedicated family space to accommodate larger groups during stressful patient events.
Her advocacy for equitable access to nature and daylight produced one of the project’s most distinctive features, a multipurpose “four-seasons” room on each patient bed unit. Positioned on the southwest corner of every floor, these spaces feature two walls of glass with operable windows for natural ventilation, a meaningful function for important cultural practices and a benefit to all during Wisconsin’s four seasons. She also championed healing gardens and walking paths on the site to further support the well-being of patients, families, and staff alike.
Addressing the needs of staff, she engaged Froedtert’s human factors engineers to study care teams in existing units and make design recommendations based on their findings, including the need for flexible work environments to promote collaboration near the point of care. The result is a distribution of shared workspaces near patient rooms to support real-time, small group mentorship and care collaboration, consultation with peers, interdisciplinary planning, and comradery.
Outside of Froedtert ThedaCare Health, Roehl serves as a representative of the Nursing Institute for Healthcare Design (NIHD) on the Health Guidelines Revision Committee for the Facility Guidelines Institute. She also serves as a planning partner with the Sextant Foundation’s Reimagining Workshops, which bring together interdisciplinary professionals from healthcare, design, and regulatory fields to study conventional practices and explore new approaches to care spaces.
Through her work and industry involvement, Roehl is fostering continuous learning and shaping environments of care that respond thoughtfully to the human experience.
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