Design for hospitals over recent years has increasingly favored people-centered care and overall resilience. More than simply a building to receive diagnostics and treatment, hospitals have become well-designed places where disparate aspects are centralized and leveraged for better staff and visitor experiences.
Flexibility for growing populations and trends in care delivery, sustainable environments and emerging technology have all played a role in the evolution of hospitals in the past couple of decades. Non-traditional delivery methods such as integrated project delivery and approaches like Lean Design are also being explored more widely.
Across our broad team of healthcare experts, we’ve noted some further trends guiding the design of patient areas in hospitals, especially when it comes to new bed towers, which are often an expansion to existing healthcare campuses. Serving patients, staff, owners and the overall community, these four trends are deepening the focus on positive outcomes through design:
1. Embracing people-centric technology.
Patient experience underlines nearly every healthcare project. For bed towers, with typically longer lengths of stay, design goals often focus on enhancing comfort and convenience. Now, these improved experiences can be delivered through technology. This technology includes smart rooms where patients can control their environment, such as temperature, lighting, window shades, communication and entertainment — all while using their own devices.
Further, smart buildings can collect and use data to improve operations, sustainability and security hospital-wide. The available digital solutions to help meet those goals for healthcare owners are vast and only growing more numerous.
2. Harnessing circadian rhythms and daylight.
Lighting can play a significant role in creating a better environment in which staff can work and patients can heal. Circadian lighting techniques at University of California Irvine Medical Center focused on interior spaces where nurses and shift workers spend their time — areas often lacking views to the outside. Here, our designers explored blue light, best for alertness, and controllable warm lighting for a more natural transition at the end of shifts. At Maine Medical Center, daylight studies and virtual reality analysis led to solutions for daylight controls throughout the patient tower.
3. Leveraging new Fire and Life Safety Systems.
Fire alarm systems in hospitals require specialized engineering due to the vulnerable nature of patients and presence of medical equipment. New patient bed towers often offer the opportunity to replace or upgrade fire alarm systems in existing hospital campuses, which means better technology for this important infrastructure. A critical life-saving component of any hospital, new fire alarm and suppression systems can also improve the staff experience. Instead of being required to adapt processes and protocols to existing equipment, new high-capability systems can instead work within the parameters set by the hospital teams.
4. Prototyping patient towers.
University Health’s vision was to create one prototype hospital design for two sites in greater San Antonio. Why? To better address the needs of each community. With their respective populations growing, expanded medical services were needed, and quickly. Yet speed to care is just one benefit of prototypical hospital tower design. Reduced design and construction costs are attractive to healthcare owners, while a more responsive facility — born out of better communication and buy-in — can lead to improved patient outcomes.
Learn more about WSP’s approach to healthcare design.
