Looking for design tips for healthcare spaces? Wondering how best to plan for nursing workflow and efficient medical care? Do you need to make sure your design idea will accommodate patient and family comfort?
Here are the healthcare design resources at About.com's guide site to medical supplies.
1. 3 Inexpensive Ways to Protect Your Healthcare Architectural Investment
Healthcare design and construction projects, whether they are new buildings or renovations of old ones, are very expensive. They require a lot of capital funds, and a large quantity of hours to plan and implement.
That's why it's such a tragedy when a beautiful project finally completes and looks great on Day 1, only to have it's beauty and effectiveness cluttered by the necessary medical supplies, equipment, devices, and monitors when they are set in place.
This article will give you ideas for how to protect your architectural and design investment, while also enhancing the level of medical care provided.More »
2. 10 Ideas for Higher Satisfaction Scores When Planning Your Senior Care Unit
Senior Care Units are hospital floors with inpatient rooms designed to specifically cater to the fastest-growing patient segment, seniors.
Hospitals that understand and respond to the unique needs of seniors will win more referrals, more bed days, and higher turnovers. It's partly a popularity contest, but it's also partly a unit that can heal seniors more quickly so that they can return home sooner. More »
3. The Benefits of Floor Space in Healthcare Design
Old hospitals naturally weren't designed with the knowledge of what types of new technology would be needed in the exam rooms and patient rooms of the future. Sometimes renovations, if they gut the space sufficiently, can improve that condition. But what happens when they can't?
Alternatively, a new hospital or tower is built. In some places, there's room to spread out. But not when you're building in tightly packed cities like Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and many others.
In both scenarios, floorspace becomes a premium. Read this article to gain some ideas and insight as to how many hospitals are doing some innovative things to make the most of tight spaces.
As a bonus, I even point out how these strategies to optimize floorspace can also help reduce incidences of healthcare-acquired infections, improve breathable air quality, patient satisfaction, and employee efficiency and satisfaction. More »
4. Innovative Nurse Server and Patient Server Storage
Storage may seem mundane when compared to the sexier concepts of design and architecture. But when it comes to healthcare, designing for storage capacity and location becomes job number one.
Find out how a storage manufacturing innovator called Spacesaver has created a nurse server that recovers "dead space", improves staff efficiency, and can improve patient satisfaction in at least two ways:
- Enabling a quieter patient room by reducing the amount of times staff need to enter the room.
- Keeping staff in the room with the patient by reducing the reasons a nurse or tech would need to leave the patient to go hunt for supplies they need.
5. Inexpensive Bariatric Planning Considerations that Prevent Costly Complications
Another patient segment that is growing and therefore must be planned for is the bariatric population. Bariatric patients require a not only furniture that can accommodate them but also several types of architectural and design elements that can make their healthcare experience safer and more convenient. More »
6. Antimicrobial Copper Products for Medical Supplies and Equipment
I've included several articles that cover the infection prevention properties of antimicrobial copper. Though it may be a bit more expensive to use than less effective surface materials, the long-term reward for reduced healthcare-acquired infection rates is hard to argue against. More »
7. The Business Case for Good Lab Design
The lab, whether it is a pathology lab, phlebotomy lab, or a research lab, is one of the fastest-paced, and busiest environments in the hospital. Therefore proper design in these spaces will have a big return on investment. More »