America’s approach to behavioral health has undergone dramatic transformation within the career span of many of us who’ve been involved in the design of environments that support that care.
Merely a generation ago, it was considered highly innovative to reduce inpatient beds from thousands to hundreds and to reduce length of stay from years to weeks. Today, we’re seeing similar transformations—from hundreds of beds to dozens of beds and from weeks of stay to mere days.
The specialty of healthcare master planning is going through a series of changes, mirroring the current evolution of the healthcare industry itself.
What’s particularly interesting about this is the comprehensive nature of these types of initiatives, which may include several new components such as connecting the traditional hospital campus with related medical services near and far.
We’ve all had experiences where having an internal storeroom of resilience has come in handy. Sick kids, overwhelming workloads, training for a marathon, the loss of a loved one—all of these things and thousands more can push us to our limits, causing us to find an inner strength that allows us to pick up, dust off, start over, and thrive.
As New Orleans marks the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, two new healthcare facilities are replacing those destroyed in the disaster. With price tags of about $1 billion each, University Medical Center (UMC) New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System’s new VA medical center are designed with an impressive level of redundancy and armor to protect against a future blow.
How do errors in medication distribution impact a hospital’s bottom line? Just a single medication error can cost a facility hundreds of thousands of dollars. On a grander scale, medical errors cost up to $1 trillion annually according to a report in the Journal of Health Care Finance.
As recently as 20 years ago, there was a gold standard for clinic design, focused on caregiver needs rather than patient comfort. Clinics were aesthetically antiseptic places in which white walls, linoleum floors, fluorescent lights, and overactive air conditioners evoked a sense of sterile efficiency.
When designing facilities with lifespans of around 50 years while at the same time considering the fast advancements in medicine and technology, surgery departments, especially, must be adaptable to accommodate change.
A large piece of a hospital’s revenue comes from the surgery department, so it’s important that this revenue generator be compatible with an evolving future and that when change occurs, required updates may take place in surroundings that support change.
Last year, a provider set out to build a state-of-the-art operating room (OR) at an existing hospital with 25 ORs in various sizes and conditions. Except for nine newer ambulatory ORs, the rest were more than 30 years old and in desperate need of total overhaul. The strategy was to renovate the existing ORs one by one, starting with those that were smallest and in the poorest condition.
However, an idea surfaced to first build two ORs as a showcase, the “Operating Room of the Future,” to generate discussion.
To the city of Henderson, Nev., Union Village is 151 acres of city-owned property that sold for $11.6 million in April 2011 to boost medical infrastructure in Southern Nevada. But beyond the Las Vegas suburb, it will be the first integrated health village of its kind and the largest healthcare project in the world. On Oct. 8, 2014, ground was broken on the concept that will integrate a healthcare center into retail, entertainment, residential and senior living, and culture centers.
Healthcare facilities can quickly become obsolete unless they’re designed for flexibility and adaptability. Evolving healthcare services and delivery methods are affecting facility utilization and prompting the need to quickly answer those changes. To get the most from an investment, clinics must be planned to address this constant cycle of change.
While the concepts of flexibility and adaptability may sound similar, they reflect different approaches to planning that can bring real cost benefits to owners.
An emerging conversation about climate change places healthcare institutions, and the buildings that house them, at an inflection point. The health effects of climate change are real, apparent, and urgent.
It’s that time of the year again, when the “big” issue of Healthcare Design lands on your desk or in your inbox. This issue represents an entire year’s worth of the best healthcare projects from not just the U.S. but from around the world—projects that are both built and now in use as well as conceptual and years away from seeing their first customers.
