Hospital Design Tips

Author: Wullie Scott

All healthcare facilities as part of the hospital design process require some kind of Nurse Call System which includes patient-to-staff and staff-to-staff calls when the need arises.

When the nurse call is initiated, it buzzes at the nearest staff base, where the staff responsible can find out from the nurse call panel mounted on the wall, where the call originated. Once in the correct location, they can spot the nurse call lamp which can be ceiling or above door wall mounted to guide the staff to the correct room, where they can use the reset button to reset the buzzers and blinking lights and attend to the patients needs. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Our last hospital design article on fire escapes for disabled, based on a client query has proved very popular with the hospitaldesigntips.com visitors. It has encouraged me to come up with more apt advice on how to go about with the hospital design.

A doctor friend of ours from India requested:

We are planning for a multi specialty hospital in 1.5 acres. we need advice for the building plan and how to go about? [Read the rest of this entry...]

Designing an operating theatre outlines the intricacies of the hospital design process. An operating theatre suite consists of the Theatre, the Anaesthetic room, Scrub room and the Dirty Utility (or just Utility) room. We will look at planning just the Operating Theatre itself in this hospital design guide article.

The size and room dimensions vary but as an indication it should be about 7 meters wide by 8 meters long (56 square meters). [Read the rest of this entry...]

Actually this article was supposed to be a reply to a comment from one of www.hospitaldesigntips.com visitors who was interested to find out more about hospital design issues with respect to fire escapes and relevant legislation. Here’s how it went:

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If you are planning on opening your own new dental surgery, you would have worked in one for a number of years or at least a few months. You would be familiar with the equipment, layout and the quality of cabinetry. Laying out or planning a dental surgery is not a very complex job. There are, however, a few issues that can differentiate between a professionally kitted out dental surgery with optimum layout and one that may look like a torture room in some horror movie.

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Of all the clinical areas in any hospital, X-Ray, CT, and Fluoroscopy need much more planning and co-ordination than any other thing imaginable. This is mostly due to the fact that the equipment used and its implications on the building structure and services is much more complex with the exception of the MRI. We will deal with MRI in another article and will only discuss factors to be considered while designing an X-Ray room, which, in principle will hold for the CT & Fluoroscopy rooms as well.

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Planning Pathology labs including microbiology, biochemistry and haematology should be fairly simple and straight forward. But we know from experience that if careful thought is not given at the design and planning stage, the simplest of things can and most probably will go wrong.

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Building on my previous article on Environment & Sustainability I deemed it fit to post a few thoughts on the use of green and brown roofs and their hugely popular positive contribution to the environment.

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In the UK, PFI (Private Finance Initiative) has generated a renewed interest in hospital design arena. It effectively provides us an opportunity to consider the hospitals as Therapeutic Environments. Hospital design managers like me, believe that expert knowledge has encouraged the development of hospitals that provide settings for promoting patient recovery, healing and well being.

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Medical equipment planning and layout design are one of the trickiest parts within the hospital design process and as such demand a thorough consideration of all aspects.

Each clinical space is woven around how clinicians interact with the equipment and the patients. It takes into account the universal principles of infection control, general hygiene and ease of maintenance and cleaning. This is the common sense stuff with things like locating wash hand basins near the entrance to remind medical staff to wash hands before and after interacting with the patients.

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