At the new Colorado Institute for Maternal and Fetal Health (CIMFH) outpost at Children’s Hospital Colorado, the designers included a full kitchen, accessible to all patients and their visitors in this highly specialized care unit. Almost immediately after opening in early November 2012, a patient’s family asked to use it to serve a complete Thanksgiving feast.
It would be funny if it weren’t so scary—and more than a little sad. At North Shore University Hospital on Long Island, reports the New York Times, sensors and cameras are being used to monitor staff hand-washing.
The jury for the Architectural and Interior Design Showcase is a neat little microcosm of Healthcare Design’s readership and conference attendees: a smart, passionate group of architects, interior designers, healthcare providers, construction pros, and educators.
Last week, Healthcare Design assembled the team of jurors for our annual Architectural and Interior Design Showcase, where we huddled in a room at the IIDA headquarters in Chicago for a full day.
Within a 24-hour care environment, noise—a steady hum of activity often punctuated by jarring equipment beeps, squeaky medical carts, or even running footsteps and raised voices—is all but inevitable. And there are certainly steps designers can take to mitigate that noise through material choices, patient floor layout, and other means.
It’s pretty common now to hear about the efforts healthcare providers and designers are making to ensure their facilities both reflect and contribute to the communities outside their doors. But it was only when I started reading through all the articles for our May/June print issue that it dawned on me just how many ways there are to define what being “of the community” means.
At a time when “improving patient outcomes” is the first thing off anyone’s lips regarding the ultimate goal in designing healthcare facilities, the work of MASS Design Group (Boston) stands out as an extreme example of that goal in practice.
At a time when “improving patient outcomes” is the first thing off anyone’s lips regarding the ultimate goal in designing healthcare facilities, the work of MASS Design Group (Boston) stands out as an extreme example of that goal in practice.
The stories are starting to trickle in, as they always do after these tragedies, of the acts of bravery, kindness, selflessness, and heroism that occurred immediately in the aftermath of this week’s Boston Marathon bombings. We need these stories to get us through—we need to be reminded, as actor Patton Oswalt so perfectly stated on his Facebook page, to look evil in the eye and tell it: “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”
Michael David White, senior lighting designer, Schuler Shook, presented a compelling argument for a new approach to lighting design within senior living environments during his session at the 2013 Environments for Aging Conference. Backed by research that was thoughtfully and clearly explained, White laid out the evidence to support a broader definition of lighting itself, drawing a distinction between “visual darkness” and “circadian darkness.”
Designing for the continuum of care—both architecturally and clinically—is all the rage right now, but some designers and care organizations feel that hospice and palliative care have been tucked in the back corner of eldercare for too long. The 2013 Environments for Aging conference in New Orleans gave providers, architects and designers a chance to show how elder-living spaces, hospitals and end-of-life care teams can exist in a symbiotic relationship.
In every keynote, every session, at the 2013 Environments for Aging Conference in New Orleans this week, the statistics and charts and graphs were like a hammer to the head.
