As 2014 approaches, The Center for Health Design (CHD) is preparing to move into the last year of our five-year strategic plan and start laying groundwork for the next.
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Healthcare Design Magazine Gets Social
Talking about your job makes it easier, right? Are you looking for a forum brimming with other healthcare design professionals like yourself?
Boomer Nation: Making Healthcare Facility Parking Easy
The baby boomer generation—or as I call them in this blog series, Boomer Nation—has emerged as the largest segment of healthcare system users. This generation is entering the retirement and Medicaid phases of their lives, and the statistics around this generation are staggering. Healthcare planners and designers will have to respond to a number of new design criteria that are a result of this demographic. This includes making parking more accessible for the older patient population.
Designing The Med-Surg Room
The inpatient room is arguably the most comprehensively addressed setting in healthcare, with a large body of evidence for designers to draw upon. Yet the “ideal” patient room remains a myth. Although there are unique issues in the design of each project, whether new build or renovation, there’s a need to collate existing design research on inpatient rooms and translate it into an actionable format to help decision-making across the board.
Former Disney Exec Talks About Creating An Ideal Patient Experience
Sharing some of the lessons he learned during his time working at The Walt Disney Co., Jake Poore, founder and president of Integrated Loyalty Systems, delved into the core aspects of creating an ideal user experience during his closing keynote session at the recent Healthcare Design Conference in Orlando, Fla.
Poore said that designers are at the forefront of crafting that experience for pati
Looking Below The Surface For Cultural Values To Shape Healthcare Design
Over the past year, I had the good fortune to host a high school exchange student from China. Before Rose came to stay with us, our student representative from AFS-USA, which manages international exchange programs, compared cultural history to an iceberg—with one-third of culture visible and two-thirds hidden beneath the water.
Building To Honor And Heal Veterans
The 2013 Healthcare Design Conference got off to a great start on Nov. 16. One of the many features of the day were the facility tours which gave attendees the opportunity to visit a select group of healthcare buildings in the Orlando, Fla. area.
I was fortunate enough to go on the hard hat tour of the Orlando Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center which is still very much under construction.
Top 10 Designs to Rethink in Your BH Facility
James Hunt started his Healthcare Design Conference session on Monday by saying that if you're running your behavioral health facility on the principle of "that's the way we've always done it," it's time to change.
His session was titled "10 Things You Know That Just Ain't So," paraphrasing a quote by Satchel Paige that is along the same lines: "It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you 'know' that just ain't so."
"Behavioral health (BH) roo
When patients are architects
Hospitals are busy places—and caregivers, busy people. And it has traditionally been to them and their preferences that hospital planners have largely considered when designing bed placements, bathrooms, medical equipment, etc. Now patients are becoming part of the conversation–and when the patient is also an architect, the planners are even more likely to listen. Someone like Patricia Haley.
HCD Conference 2013: Live Feed
Design Solutions For Greening Hospital Labs
We know that hospitals are energy and water intensive, and when looking inside, laboratory space emerges as one of the worst offenders. As with all conservation measures, best practices start with downsizing wherever practical.
Fume hoods
Fume hoods may provide one of the biggest opportunities for energy conservation within a lab environment, since they demand high air flow that may drive the overall HVAC sizing and energy requirements of the building.
New Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center Supports Holistic Health
Named for a young girl who died in the 1970s from a simple, treatable infection due to lack of available care, the Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center was founded 35 years ago in a small garage to provide healthcare to migrant farm workers and their families. It’s grown to an organization that provides comprehensive health services to more than 35,000 people.
