Nursing Units Evolve
by Janet Faulkner, AIA
Acute-care units in U.S. hospitals face challenges: low satisfaction levels for patients and caregivers, ineffective materials flow, lack of storage, inefficient use of beds, and a shortage of nurses, technicians, and other health workers.
Reduced reimbursements don't help, nor does a diminishing supply of operational capital. To top things off, design has often magnified these problems, when it should be helping to alleviate them. But how? What should the acute-care unit of the future look like?
Where We've Been
A brief review of the evolution of the configuration of patient floors shows a variety of shapes as each iteration attempted to solve a different problem.
For one configuration, visibility of the patient was the focus. For another, decreasing the caregiver's daily hike was paramount. Yet each solution invariably compromised other needs — materials flow, storage, patient needs, caregiver requirements — sometimes to the point where the concessions outweighed the intended solution.
Years of incremental tinkering have resulted in today's typical acute-care unit, which forces inefficiencies in a world where efficiency is the only way to succeed. The most important lesson from the past? Let it go. To design the acute-care unit of the future, let's start with current needs, not those of the last century. >>>
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Room-side charting stations decrease travel distances for nurses.
Photo: Chris Eden
"Care-ports," or nurse stations outfitted to serve as many as three nursing teams, help caregivers maintain critical contact with colleagues.
Photo: Chris Eden
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