Facilities & Operations

Technology and Patient Safety

Capturing the power of technology

While healthcare is beneficial in the aggregate, it may also result in harm. Information technology may be used in a variety of ways to improve the safety and efficiency of healthcare.

Reducing ICU Mortality

Strategies for the 21st century

Over the years, Intensive Care Units have become the hot corner of hospitals. In the near future, new automated systems will ease ICU patient monitoring and secure delivery of sophisticated treatments.

Surgical Workflow

Methods and applications

Given a great demand for a rigorous analysis of surgical interventions, Surgical Workflow Analysis proves to be a powerful methodology to understand and describe surgical procedures.

In and Out of the Emergency Room

Streamlined design of patient flow

Many factors influence the patient throughput in and out of the Emergency Department. Clarity in layout and simplicity in operations are keys to streamlined flow.

Patient Safety and Risk Management

A look at the basics

Even as modern healthcare continues to achieve excellent results, all too often patients are put at risk either through errors or through failure to assess their needs properly, manage their care and recognise deterioration.

Improving Reliability for Safer Care

A proactive approach

Reliability and safety are now essential components of healthcare. However, providing better care requires a proactive approach from the providers.

State of Sustainable Design in Healthcare

A commentary

A more transformative vision of ‘living’ and ‘regenerative’ hospital buildings is beginning to coalesce worldwide. Primarily, this vision finds its roots in the connection between buildings and health.

Sustainable Hospital Design

Beyond the numbers

The new trend to design and build hospitals using sustainable technology, renewable resources and systems designed to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions is making it possible to achieve higher building performance in terms of reduced energy consumption, improved indoor air quality and a supportive healing environment.

The Hospital of the Future Isn’t...

Role of architects

The concepts for what the hospital of the future ‘is likely to be’ and ‘isn’t’ include distributed services, the ‘hospital at home’ project, ‘wearable hospital’ telemedicine innovations, ‘lean design’ principles and ‘cellular care.’ These concepts dictate the design professional’s responsibilities within an era of healthcare reform...

Baylor Emergency Department

Providing the state-of-the-art services

The Baylor University Medical Center's Emergency Department in Dallas, Texas has been operating at near capacity for almost 10 years. The high number of patients combined with the dearth of resources lead to an inevitable and unwelcome decline in service. To correct this issue, Baylor brought in local architect t. howard + associates and North Carolinabased architect FreemanWhite to perform a 75,000 sq.ft. renovation and addition to the ED. This more than doubled its capacity to care for patients and tripled the footage of the ED.

Quality and Safety

Creating a supportive culture

A process-oriented approach, which sees care as both social and technical, naturally supports a positive quality improvement strategy and aligns the major subcultures.

Benchmarking and Measuring Patient Safety

The Medway model

The Medway Nursing and Midwifery Accountability System (NMAS) is a model that calls nurses and midwives to account for their performance in relation to nursing care and patient safety.

Art for Health's Sake

An evidence-based approach

The human mind and body are so intrinsically linked that "feeling" better is a huge step towards "being" better. This makes the role of art very critical in today's healthcare.

Healthcare Facilities Design

A global perspective

The battle to deliver high-quality care at affordable costs will only be won through refinement of process flows and a thorough understanding of long-term operational costs as well as initial capital costs.

Lean Process Program Planning

Guidelines for optimum operations and design

Lessons learnt from the appropriate incorporation of “Lean” considerations during the functional and space programming phases and then the conceptual and preliminary design phases, can positively impact immediate, short-term and long-range operational expenses.

Generative Space

Creating sustainable improvements

The Leading by Design research project is working with 11 case studies in three countries to operationalise ‘generative space’ as a means to use the environment to make systemic and sustainable improvements in healthcare.

Healthcare Design

The need for consumer-driven research

The pivotal role of healthcare design in the improvement of healthcare delivery has become widely accepted under the rubric of evidence-based design. However, there is a need for consumer-driven, comprehensive programming methodology applicable to healthcare design projects in Asia and the United States.

Desperately Seeking Safety

Creating integrated surgical/imaging environments that do less harm

The need for healthcare facilities designed for safety and the convergence of surgery and imaging are resulting in new types of space where medical technology is complex and where safe environments are essential.

Patient Safety

The next level

There is growing acceptance of the newer methods in patient safety and a call to combine both retrospective and prospective methods in order to gain a complete picture of the patient safety challenge.

Hospital of Tomorrow

The design perspective

The speciality of the Hospital of Tomorrow will be a combination of features for the well-being of not only the patients and their relatives, but the doctors, nurses and all the staff of the hospital as well.

Infection Control

The role of nonwoven textiles

Using the right surgical barrier and protective gowns, masks, head and footwear are some of the key means to achieving optimal protection from infection.

Infection Control - The SARS epidemic:

Containment and Control

The SARS outbreak would not have been successfully controlled without the collaborative work with several partners - government authorities, hospital management, healthcare workers and the public.

Infection Control

The Mask Crusade

Breathing also creates a 'bellows effect' causing the mask to contact the nose and mouth.

Infection Control

Resurgence or Reaction?

Hospitals were advised not to take a quick-fix approach to the problem of reducing infections, but rather it must be a long-term commitment not simply the 'problem of the month'.

Infection Control

Contamination Containment

The risks of bio-contamination and the preventative role of the laundry process.

Waste

Attitudes and Actions

The handling of hospital solid waste may increase airborne bacteria if not handled properly and the transmission of viable organisms to other parts of hospital and community is possible.

Bridging the Gulf in Infection Control

A Memish explore some of the advances in infection control that are bringing Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries into line with the highest international standards