HCD Guest Author

It doesn’t pay to incorporate a broken process into a new building, so say administrators at Children’s Medical Center Dallas and Children’s of Alabama. When designing their new facilities, they set out to do things differently. 

The battle over infection prevention has been waged on most surfaces, materials, and equipment in the patient room. The quest to curb hospital-borne infections has made patient rooms easier to clean and created processes that remove materials that may be home to bacteria.

One area that's often overlooked in this war on infection prevention is the privacy curtain. 

The purpose of a privacy curtain is to provide privacy to the patient during personal procedures and personal care. However, privacy needs to be balanced with infection prevention.

Following the devastating earthquake in 2010, Haiti now faces another epidemic: cholera, a disease that’s infected more than 530,000 Haitian citizens. Spread through contaminated food or water, cholera kills more than 100,000 people each year despite the fact that, with proper treatment, its fatality rate can be less than 1 percent.

Despite all the uncertainly created with the Affordable Care Act, many of our healthcare design clients continue to heal and recover from the jolt in 2008 and 2009. Many have staffing levels that match, or in some cases exceed, levels from four years ago.  

Pent-up demand to renovate or expand healthcare facilities in the United States continues to keep many firms busy and once again upping their recruiting efforts. 

For the past few years, Mortenson Construction has surveyed attendees of the HEALTHCARE DESIGN Conference, which was held in Phoenix this past year, and compiled the results into white papers that provide a general picture of the state of the healthcare design industry, as well as facilities trends.

In my last post, I discussed how facility prototyping is an effective tool to test evolving healthcare models. Prototyping allows designers and healthcare owners to cost-effectively evaluate design ideas that can lead to more efficient workflows and better patient outcomes. 

There’s a poster I’ve seen a number of times that says, “All I need to know I learned in kindergarten.” It reminds us of a number of life’s basics, starting with “share everything” and “play fair.”

Not only are these good reminders for life, they’re a very good starting point for right-sizing the rural hospital. In particular, the constraints placed on the small rural hospital in terms of size, staff, and budget make “share everything” a critical part of design success.

The seasoned veterans of the healthcare planning and design industry have a very good feeling about the challenges we face in our industry. Of course, there are a myriad of challenges in areas that design professionals cannot control—reimbursement and healthcare reform to name a few. 

However, these should not be seen as difficult years, but rather years of opportunity as we make the necessary adjustments and changes to the healthcare system so it becomes sustainable for many years.

As the economic climate in the design industry begins to slowly try and get on an even keel, there’s a sector that has continued to expand its reach internationally while also focusing more on communities here in the United States.

In a perfect world, all new healthcare buildings would operate exactly as designed and would stay that way for the life of the facility. However, in the non-perfect world we live in, most buildings don't operate as designed.

Is this the fault of the engineer, the contractor, or some other entity? All new healthcare buildings are complex and one of a kind—a prototype. There are hundreds of people involved at all levels. There are thousands of moving parts, featuring dynamic systems that are essential for health and safety.

The history of Adelante Healthcare Mesa, a 42,500-square-foot, nonprofit, Federally Qualified Health Center in Mesa, Ariz., is steeped in a commitment to provide access to healthcare services for the under- and uninsured of Maricopa County.