“The notion that the physical environment, defined broadly, affects health outcomes has been around for thousands of years,” says Roger Ulrich, professor of architecture at Texas A&M University.

Source: Sunday Gazette - Mail; Charleston, W.V. Publication date: January 14, 2007 By Josh Goldstein

PHILADELPHIA - After more than a decade of hospital closures and consolidations, the region’s health-care industry is in the midst of a $4 billion building boom and a new breed of hospital. Using evidence-based design - the nascent science of configuring the physical structure of hospitals to improve care and reduce errors - projects are sprouting from Voorhees to West Philadelphia and from Fox Chase to Paoli. In Camden, N.J., Cooper University Hospital is constructing an ultramodern inpatient pavilion showcasing many of the new design elements. The 10-story, $218 million building will feature private rooms, dispersed nursing stations, noise-reducing ceilings, and lots of natural light. When complete in the fall of 2008, the Cooper building should look more like a five-star hotel than a hospital and feel like one too - administrative staff spent a week getting customer-service training from Ritz-Carlton.

Beneath surface appearances, research - similar to that used to develop new drugs and medical techniques - guides a design aimed at enhancing patient health and the quality of care, and limiting complications such as infections. “The notion that the physical environment, defined broadly, affects health outcomes has been around for thousands of years,” says Roger Ulrich, professor of architecture at Texas A&M University. “What is new is that the concept has become scientific, truly evidence-based.” Twenty-two years ago, Ulrich published a study of surgical patients that found those who could see trees outside their windows had shorter postoperative hospital stays, took less pain medicine, and had fewer complications. At the time, little research existed on the relationship between health-care design and patient health. Two years ago Ulrich and a colleague reviewed the scientific literature of evidence-based design and found more than 600 such studies. Those studies examined issues such as how patient-friendly hospitals could deliver better care by lowering stress and fatigue among hospital staff, and promote faster healing. Simple things, like replacing double rooms with singles to reduce hospital-acquired infections, seem like common sense. Now scientific studies prove “what we sort of already knew,” says EwingCole architect J. Andrew Jarvis, who has led the Cooper project. The new approach, he says, “is not a panacea and certainly not a stopping point. Architects need to press forward with elements that make sense, but are not yet proven.” So in Cooper’s new patient rooms, Jarvis’ team has tucked hazardous-waste receptacles out of the patient’s view to eliminate that reminder of danger and illness. “That to me makes sense as better for a patient’s health, even if it hasn’t been proven.” As the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Northeast Philadelphia begins its 20-year, $1 billion expansion, it is applying the lessons to its new Center for Women’s Cancers. “What we are trying to do is design something that aids in patient cancer treatment, that increases their comfort level and that reduces the scariness of cancer care,” said Robert C. Young, Fox Chase’s president.

There are benefits to staff as well. Placing supplies and smaller nursing stations throughout the floor can cut walking for nurses in half, freeing time for patient care. All the rooms in Cooper’s new building are standardized so all the beds are against the same wall, angled toward the windows. This gives the patients a view and it makes it easier for nurses to see patients who require regular observation from the hall.

(c) 2007 Sunday Gazette - Mail; Charleston, W.V.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

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