Health Outcomes Driving New Hospital Design

From the New York Times website
Health Outcomes Driving New Hospital Design

By CAROL ANN CAMPBELL
Published: May 18, 2009

The curtain between two hospital beds does not stop noise from the television set, offer privacy during sensitive conversations with doctors or stop germs from spreading. Yet in most of America’s aging hospitals it is the only thing that separates strangers thrust together as roommates simply because both are ill.
HUSHED Rooms at Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital in Michigan do not share walls or ceilings, cutting noise.

But in many new hospitals and pavilions, these semiprivate rooms have vanished. Single-patient rooms are now viewed as an important element of high-quality health care.

The benefits of the single room emerged through evidence-based hospital design, a new field that guides health care construction. More than 1,500 studies have examined ways that design can reduce medical errors, infections and falls — and relieve patient stress.

American hospitals started 53 million square feet of new construction and major additions in 2008, according to a report by McGraw-Hill Construction, a company that tracks industry trends. Promoters of evidence-based design say that a building exerts a powerful force on the delivery of health care, and that the best new health centers are light-filled, quiet and easy to navigate.

“Some hospitals are taking evidence-based design seriously,” said Roger Ulrich, director of the Center for Health Systems and Design at Texas A&M. “Other institutions use pretty traditional design that pays lip service to the evidence. There may be high style, but the hospital is still noisy. Or the windows are too small to let much light in. There are missed opportunities.”

Besides privacy, research shows that single rooms reduce infections and patient stress, and improve sleep. In 2006, the American Institute of Architects called for single rooms in all new hospital construction............

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