Volume 4: High-Performance Nursing Units and Patient Room Innovation
2013 | Volume 04
How can 500 Square Feet Save your Hospital $1,000,000?
High-performance nursing units and clinically-focused yet patient-centric room design must be an essential element of healthcare facility solutions to be competitive in the marketplace.
The 24 hour/7 day nature of inpatient care offers opportunities to improve care, produce better clinical outcomes, reduce lengths of stay, deliver dignified care, support families, and add convenience for visitors; while concurrently meeting your competition head-on with efficiency and productivity. This opportunity exists every minute of every day in the nursing units and patient rooms. Yet, few design innovations for staff optimization occur in individual patient rooms or the consolidated nursing unit platform. Why?
These areas are heavily utilized and are frequently repetitive in design; thus, undertaking a substantial renovation is expensive and disruptive.
Likewise, the design of patient rooms is usually determined by the structural grid of the building, limiting the scope of renovation options. Often patient rooms/nursing units are the last areas of the healthcare platform to see substantive changes in design even though they represent the best opportunity to impact patient outcomes and improve satisfaction due to patients’ length of time in this environment.
This juxtaposition: the most significant opportunity for improvements vs. least likely to be enhanced must change if our health care system is to change and improve.
