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« "Caring for Your Parents" | Main | Aging, Caring For Aged »

March 31, 2008 |Permalink |Comments (1)

Health Care Design

Andrew Sullivan highlights an important issue--- the role good design should play in health care.

This quote is from Virgina Postrel's article in the Atlantic Monthly...

Mounting clinical evidence suggests that better design can improve patients’ health—not to mention their morale. But the one-sixth of the American economy devoted to health care hasn’t kept up with the rest of the economy’s aesthetic imperative, leaving patients to wonder, as a diabetes blogger puts it, “why hospital clinic interiors have to feel so much like a Motel 6 from the ’70s.”

A Hyatt from the early ’80s might be more accurate. The United States is in the midst of a hospital-building boom, with some $200 billion expected to be spent on new facilities between 2004 and 2014. Although more spacious and sunlit than the 50-year-old boxes they often replace, even new medical centers tend to concentrate their amenities in public areas, the way hotels used to feature lavish atriums but furnish guest rooms with dirt-hiding floral bedspreads and fake-wood desks. Hospital lobbies may now have gardens, waterfalls, and piano music, but that doesn’t mean their patient rooms, emergency departments, or imaging suites are also well designed. “Except for the computers you see, it’s like a 1980s hospital,” says Jain Malkin, a San Diego–based interior designer and the author of several reference books on health-care design. “The place where patients spend their time 24/7 is treated as if it’s back-of-the-house.”

Can we do better?

We sure can...

Comments ( 1)

I agree very much that we can do better. Again, we have to distinguish between hospitals and nursing homes or assisted living. In the hospital field Planetree is going into the right direction (www.planetree.org). For homes, this is where residents LIVE, the Green house model is a pioneering step. For Europe, we have worked together to create design principles for buildings, based on the Eden Alternative. In a pre-design process we bring together users, organisations and architects in order to build the right stage for the play, which is quality of life and quality of work. We are so happy to work with Emi Kiyota, a PhD Student from the Institute of Environment and Aging in Milwaukee, her supervisor, other colleagues and interested architects. Together, we hope we can change the physical face of Eldercare. Please contact us if you are interested in our work: monkhouse@eden-europe.net

Posted by Christa Monkhouse
March 31, 2008 11:00 AM

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