On this collection, Healthcare Design asks main healthcare design professionals, companies, and homeowners to inform us what has their consideration and share concepts on the topic.
Kevin Hinrichs is the president of Taylor Design, an structure, planning, inside design, and design technique agency with 5 California workplaces. Right here, he shares his ideas on caring for healthcare employees, provide chain disruptions, and designing for catastrophe.
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Caring for healthcare employees
Even earlier than COVID, prioritizing house for healthcare employees was a battleground for negotiation. Caregivers by no means ask for particular therapy as a result of that’s simply who they’re. In consequence, healthcare employees traditionally have acquired leftover house, akin to windowless breakrooms within the pits of the power. However the fixed and intense strain that caregivers face requires a spot of respite. This grew extra apparent throughout COVID, not solely as a result of there have been so many sick and dying sufferers, however as a result of household and mates couldn’t assist ease the burden. Although healthcare planning continuously struggles to prioritize house for workers within the context of total facility value, homeowners at the moment are extra conscious of the necessity to present ample and appropriate house for caregivers, together with out of doors areas unique to employees.
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Moneyball and healthcare
Healthcare leaders need related statistical data to information their facility design and operations selections, and that is making a surge of knowledge in our business. Decoding this knowledge is a posh worth proposition. It jogs my memory of the movie “Moneyball,” which tells the story of how knowledge disrupted all the baseball business. Healthcare leaders nonetheless must know what to have a look at and the way to interpret it, however they’re keen to make use of the obtainable knowledge on elements akin to demographics, affected person therapy flows, and spatial must optimize the restricted variety of assets and house they’ve. This protects money and time, whereas additionally delivering a greater expertise for sufferers, guests, and employees. For instance, a healthcare system saved greater than $25 million by consolidating house for catheterization labs, pre-operative bays, and post-anesthesia care models after consulting demand-time knowledge.
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Provide chain disruptions
The worldwide provide chain disaster has affected healthcare design—because it has different building markets—as a result of we will not reliably procure or precisely predict the supply of supplies and tools essential to facility completion. We’ve had supplies fail to reach when anticipated, leaving the subcontractors we scheduled unable to finish their work. Then, when the supplies lastly did are available, subcontractors had been unavailable. Due to the ripple impact {that a} provide chain disruption could cause to the design schedule, venture groups should pay extra consideration upfront to what’s doubtless and never more likely to be obtainable for procurement. This implies doing parallel designs, in addition to utilizing various supplies and building processes to construct flexibility into the method. Choices on what to specify and the way to assemble the venture must occur a lot additional prematurely to permit time for designers to correctly coordinate with different disciplines.
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Designing for resiliency
We’re primarily based in California, so between wildfires, earthquakes, and floods, we’re aware of the idea of designing resiliency into our healthcare amenities. Then got here COVID and we noticed our hospitals and healthcare clinics fully change how they perform to accommodate this new menace. In gentle of this, considered one of our senior associates is working with the California Department of Healthcare Access and Information (HCAI) to develop an emergency design information to assist healthcare networks construct resiliency and adaptability into their emergency departments. The purpose is to encourage design that helps healthcare methods reply higher to disasters by creating adaptable amenities that permit them to flip a change and performance very in another way in a disaster. For instance, designing sufficient flexibility into therapy rooms to allow them to accommodate burn victims shortly and effectively within the occasion of a large fireplace casualty occasion. (For extra on COVID-19’s affect on healthcare design go right here.)
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Various design enter
In our strategy to healthcare facility design, we worth variety within the time period’s broadest sense. Various technical expertise from group members who’ve labored in a unique business or nation presents us a wealth of alternate options when addressing a novel design problem. Various specialty advisors, together with these representing well being sciences, facility planning, healthcare administration, and medical operations, are introduced into our group to deal with all facets of a facility’s perform and function. Various stakeholders, together with sufferers, household, and healthcare suppliers, supply enter on the design course of and finally the design consequence. Accumulating these various viewpoints, then synthesizing and implementing the very best concepts, helps us enhance effectivity, which might lower constructing measurement, cut back value, and restrict waste.
Wish to share your High 5? Contact Managing Editor Tracey Walker at [email protected] for submission directions.
