Life Saving Design

Hintz adds that private rooms offer patients a sense of control over their experience, which is essential to the healing process. The privacy also encourages more family participation and increases the level and effectiveness of communication between physicians, patients, and their support groups.

“We also understand the importance of nature in the healing process,” notes Zborowsky, who says that clients are increasingly willing to pay for exterior or interior gardens in their facilities. “In one project we’re doing, there’s an interior garden right next to the [intensive care unit], because we know people heal and find solace in the natural environment. And because these patients can’t get to the natural environment, it means we have to consider bringing it to them.”

Safety and Satisfaction

As noted earlier, facilities can play a role in medical mistakes, and health care companies are looking to ensure staff safety and reduce errors with evidence-based design principles.

Bloomington-based HealthPartners, for example, is adding 22 new operating rooms to its Regions Hospital in downtown St. Paul. Once completed in 2009, all these new ORs essentially will be interchangeable. “Standardization is a good thing; it’s known to produce a safer environment,” explains Kathy Standing, HealthPartners’ senior director of facility development and space planning. “If every room is the same, whether it’s an exam room or a surgery room, and all the supplies are in the same place, it helps significantly in terms of the safety issue.”

Park Nicollet Health Services, at its new Chanhassen clinic, created a “self-rooming” process and built an office environment to support it. When patients enter the site’s reception area, which features an open design that enables staff and patients to easily see one another, they’re greeted by a staff member and given a room assignment and directions. Once in the room, various services, including the lab tests, come to the patient, thereby reducing patient movement and minimizing “handoffs” between departments.

“The fewer handoffs you have with a patient, the fewer opportunities you have for error in the transfer of information between the different care ‘episodes’ a patient might have along the way,” says Duane Spiegle, vice president of real estate and support services for St. Louis Park–based Park Nicollet.

Hospitals and clinics also are being designed with the safety and satisfaction of their staffs in mind. “We know from research that there is a direct correlation between staff satisfaction and patient satisfaction,” Zborowsky says. Buildings designed with the appropriate aforementioned adjacencies enable staff members to spend more of their time providing patient care and less shuffling from one space to another. Garden areas and water features also provide soothing areas for those providing care, while more windows and increased natural lighting upgrade the working and healing environment.