Hospitals of the future Jan 2004
What makes for good
hospital design?
 ‘If my hospital was a car, it would be like a
transit van - a bit old and knackered, but fits a lot in the back’ –
that’s how one nurse described the hospital she worked in when asked to imagine it as
a car.
The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) and the
Royal College of Nursing (RCN) have launched the Healthy Hospitals campaign, calling for
radical improvements in the design of new hospitals. The
government plans to build over 100 new state of the art hospitals by 2010 at a cost of
£11.4 billion. When this building programme is
completed it will affect one in four nurses and one in four patients nationwide. |
How do nurses perceive the effect of hospital design
on the recovery rate of patients and their own levels of stress and morale? A report based on the views of 500 nurses revealed
the following:
91% of nurses surveyed believe that a well
designed hospital environment is significantly related to patient recovery rates
90% of all nurses agree that working in a poorly
designed hospital contributes significantly to increased stress levels
90% of Directors of Nursing say that patients behave
better towards staff in well-designed wards and rooms
79% of nurses believe that the design of a hospital
makes a difference to staff morale
87% of nurses say that a well designed hospital would
help them to do their job better
99% of nurses agree they should be consulted on
hospital design issues, but only 44% actually think they currently exert any influence
CABE invited some of Britain’s
cutting edge architects and designers to generate visions for how a hospital
could be designed. Four teams have produced innovative and exciting images
that were put to the public vote. Now they just need to be built!
NB
 Hospitals can be dangerous places. Well over
30,000 patients die in American hospitals every year from some medical mishap, while
167,000 will suffer a serious injury that will at the very least extend their hospital
stay.
The most dangerous procedure was vaginal delivery by forceps and other surgical
instruments, with over 22 per cent of all procedures resulting in injury. The second
highest was caused by vaginal birth without forceps, with nearly 9 per cent of all
procedures injuring the patient. But postoperative sepsis-which occurs in 1.12 per cent of
all patients-had the biggest impact, resulting in an extended hospital stay of an
additional 11 days.
This alarming picture, prepared by researchers from the Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, is a 'best guesstimate' based on 7.45 million discharge records collected from
994 hospitals across 28 states in the USA during 2000.
If you are facing a hospital stay, arm yourself with a copy of the Hospital Survival Guide
published by What Doctors Don’t Tell You. To order, click on this link:
http://www.wddty.co.uk/shop/details.asp?product=14
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