Designing the Patient Room: Things to Consider, Part 2
Designing the patient room requires many considerations. Here are the considerations based on design elements and future-proofing, which is creating a design that can easily accommodate future adjustments in healthcare service delivery.
SPACE
Richard Lasam
4/5/20255 min read
Continuing from my last post on considerations in designing patient rooms of a healthcare facility, I list here the considerations based on design elements and future-proofing.
Design Elements of a Patient Room
1. Types of Patient Rooms. Depending on the operations of the healthcare facility, some facilities may require more patient rooms that only have one patient resting inside (a private room), all the way to large halls with multiple patient beds located inside. Again, this is based on the needs of the healthcare facility.
2. Adjacency and Visual Connection to Nurse Station. The design of your patient rooms will need to answer these two aspects: 1) how fast a nurse can reach a patient room from the nurse station; and 2) if the nurse station staff can observe the door of the patient room from the station. This can be anything from physical design or operational solutions like cameras or nurse call systems.
3. Hallway Design. As I discussed before, the hallways of the inpatient areas where patient rooms are located should have enough space for two-way traffic of patients on stretchers and wheelchairs.
4. Clean Materials for Specifications. The walls, floors, and ceilings of the inpatient areas should have surfaces that are easy to clean and sterilize. This type of clean mantra for materials also applies to furniture, counters, and any surface that may potentially harbor dirt and infection diseases.
5. Vertical Access. The inpatient areas must have efficient access to the diagnostics, emergency departments, and treatment spaces of the healthcare facility. This is essential in giving care or taking diagnostic tests at the correct time, as well as having no disruptions on supplies reaching the inpatient spaces. Often, vertical access systems like ramps, stairs, and elevators are traffic bottlenecks in the facility if they are not properly designed.
6. Safety Details. The inpatient space, much like the rest of the healthcare facility, should be designed in such a way that accidents are minimized as much as possible. Known officially as prevention of Sentinel Events. The healthcare facility and the architect must strive to create a safe environment for working and recuperation. Handrails, gurney guards, and floors designed to be not slippery are a few examples.
7. Window Design. As mentioned in my “The Call of the Void” blog post, any space in the healthcare facility that poses even a minimal risk of patients potentially falling from an elevated space must be examined closely, and this includes windows in patient rooms. By experience, any operable windows in a patient room should have a nice view of the exterior and an opening that will make it very difficult for anyone to fall out of it. A balance of safety and aesthetics must be achieved in terms of window design.
8. Door Design. In patient rooms, the doors must be wide enough to allow stretchers and wheelchairs to get through and have some way for nursing staff to view the interior of patient rooms from the hallway. However, this visual observation is slightly controversial since, there is also a need for privacy for patients from unwanted eyes looking into their rooms, so again this needs to be discussed and be based on the operational policy and direction of the healthcare facility.
9. Toilet Design. The toilet inside patient rooms will change based on the need for reducing accidents and on how many patients are recuperating inside each patient room. When you are dealing with multi-bed patient rooms, the toilets should also be designed to accommodate a significant number of people using them over the course of the stay of the patients.
Robots are already being in use today. Before you know it, their presence in a patient room will be quite ordinary.
Future-proofing the Patient Room
1. Future-proof Design. Integration of potential new treatments and health systems will need to be considered in the future of the patient rooms. As an example from recent years, I discussed in my article about the change of waiting rooms in dialysis centers. The arrival of high bandwidth Internet and smart phones has significantly reduced the need for television inside patient rooms. Other such changes might be in the horizon.
2. Smart Systems. This refers to the integration of all electrical and computer systems in the patient room to communicate and coordinate with each other using a 5G network to create data sets that may provide better healthcare delivery to the patient. Known as the IoT or Internet of Things, this type of patient room will be able to collect data from the patient with passive sensors and be a “virtual nurse” that will always be with the patient to alert the nurse station of any potential emergencies.
3. AI Integration. Artificial Intelligence is all the rage these days. Eventually (if not already), AI will be part of the everyday health interventions being done in the healthcare facility. How it affects the patient rooms will not yet be apparent, but it may involve integration of Information Technology Systems directly into the inpatient space.
4. Robotics. Robotics will be reaching medical systems sooner rather than later; much like this proof of concept video of a household robot, there are a large number of applications in which a robot will do a better job than human nursing staff in a healthcare setting—the most obvious to me is the treatment of highly infectious patients using a robot either remotely controlled by nurses or being fully autonomous. What a future that will be!
This list, combined with the one in my previous post, sure shows that there are a lot of things to consider! But this is what it takes to design healthcare facilities: the integration of multiple variables to create a coherent design for the doctors, nurses, administrators, staff, patients, and visitors who will be using the space. To make it more interesting (or confounding), this is only one aspect of the inpatient department. Nurse stations and the other support spaces are a different design task altogether, not to mention the other departments that make up a healthcare facility.
If you want to know more about the other aspects of healthcare facility design that I have written, you can read here in our blog about Design Collaboration, Master Planning, the people involved in hospital design, or about the fundamentals of hallway design, among the other topics we blog about.