A new acute care facility being constructed on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles tackles the realities of providing respiratory care, which often requires extended stays, by creating a space that's comfortable for both patients and family members while supporting education on continuing care after discharge. To this end, the design focuses on exterior and interior spaces that reflect the mission of the hospital with a peaceful, homelike setting that achieves a sense of timelessness.
As far back as 2008, we at Healthcare Design were reporting on the growing popularity of standalone emergency departments (EDs), a solution to both the rising demand for services and the declining stock of hospital-based EDs.
Five years later, little has changed. Except you can now add on the effects of healthcare reform and the age of accountable care to reasons why the facility type remains an attractive way to provide affordable care that’s accessible to patients and in a setting that's more flexible than a hospital-based ED might be.
Of all the products needed to build new healthcare facilities or update existing ones, none has undergone the basic changes in selection criteria that lighting has.
The idea: Guthrie Health’s Robert Packer Hospital in Sayre, Pa., had two very specific needs: first, to alleviate overcrowding in the emergency department and on inpatient floors caused by holding observation patients in those spaces, and second, to create an interventional radiology suite. While seemingly unrelated at first glance, the resulting space solution for each ended up fusing the two together.
It’s always nice to have a reminder of why the time- and cost-intensive planning, design, and construction of our healthcare facilities mean so much. The team building the new Golisano Children’s Hospital in Rochester, N.Y., had that opportunity last week.
More than a decade after first studying the quality of cancer care in the U.S., the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in September reported that barriers to achieving quality care remain challenging. Those barriers include a failure to provide patient-centered and palliative care, as well as a failure to make care decisions based on current scientific evidence.
There are an incredible number of variables that can influence the direction a healthcare building project might take, from budget to schedule to delivery method to ownership goals and everything in between.
Managing all of those pieces is critical to a successful facility, and telling the story behind how it all came together is just as critical for Healthcare Design’s Architectural and Interior Design Showcase.
It takes years to plan, design, construct, and open new healthcare facilities, and a lot can happen over the course of any building schedule. For projects submitted to this year’s Architectural and Interior Design Showcase, what “happened” was a worldwide economic downturn.
This year’s projects have been some of the first to illustrate the effects of that shift, with visible signs of facilities being scaled back—some a bit less lavish and a bit more efficient.
Offering refreshing solutions to projects’ specific design challenges, three of this year’s Healthcare Design Architectural and Interior Design Showcase submissions earned a Citation of Merit Honorable Mention.
The idea: Oncology services for Maury Regional Medical Center (MRMC) in Columbia, Tenn., had long been provided on the main hospital campus, but patients were required to go to multiple locations for the totality of diagnosis and treatment.
The specific needs being met by any given replacement project depend on the organization behind it, from accommodating growth in the patient population to introducing a new specialty program to simply meeting modern standards of care.
But it’s safe to say that no matter the goal, the way that new facility, unit, or department is operated will likely be different than it is in the one it’s replacing. So how do you ensure that what the project team has spent years planning, designing, and constructing is eventually used by staff in the way it was intended?
Breaking from traditional approaches to hospice care that are often modeled after skilled-nursing settings, AG Architecture Inc. (Wauwatosa, Wis.) worked with Haven Hospice to pursue a new design direction by bringing resident-centered care to the Homer J. Sr. & Fern O. Custead Care Center in Orange Park, Fla.
