Waiting Areas in the Hospital: Some Observations

My wife and I went to the hospital for our annual medical exams and got to experience firsthand how waiting areas are handled in tertiary level hospitals in the Philippines. To be fair, it was a pleasant experience overall since we went very early in the morning; so, even if we went to three departments, the waiting time and procedures were done without much issue.

I have written about waiting areas before, but it is really different to go around the actual physical space and note what can be adjusted to make the waiting experience a bit more interesting and less stressful. From a walk-in patient standpoint, here are the following tips I can recommend to be applied to such spaces.

1. More space allocated to each patient. Everybody has a different proximity bubble, that is, the space around a person that one finds comfortable. If an unknown person goes into the bubble, it is distracting and undesirable. Families and friends have almost zero proximity bubbles (i.e. they can be sitting together in a small space and be fine with it), but unknown individuals should preferably have some distance to one another. You can see this in how people try to find seats in a waiting area with no one beside them until they have no choice, so a good idea would be to provide more buffer spaces between seating (plants, coffee tables, etc.) as well as different types of seats (benches, chairs with table, couches, etc.) to create more spaces that cater to specific patients.

2. More seating space dependent on high traffic departments. During the design phase, each department has a calculated number of patients per day as well as their projection of its increase over the duration of the day. From there, the designer can prepare properly create the space for the number of seats in a waiting area. Future proof (link) this design by considering possible spaces for expansion when the number of patients increase as the hospital grows. Places like the laboratory, cardio, and imaging departments that cater to both inpatient and outpatient traffic should be designed to have enough seating space.

3. More space for extraction and procedure. Specifically in terms of laboratories, the space to extract should have ample space for the patient and the laboratory staff to work on the procedure properly. Accidents and mistakes are an eventuality in hospitals but providing the most efficient and safe space for patient and medical staff can reduce this significantly.

If you want to read more about healthcare spaces, read this about outpatient spaces on doctor's clinics and this about designing for infection control.

"Everybody has a different proximity bubble. You can see this in how people try to find seats in a waiting area with no one beside them until they have no choice, so a good idea would be to provide more buffer spaces between seating as well as different types of seats."