On our trip to Mt. Sinai hospital we were able to have the experience of visiting one of the patient room floors. This was a huge eye opener to a lot of us in the class because many of us have never had the opportunity to walk around the bed tower of a hospital. Before we got the grand tour of the hospital we were able to discuss a few things with the staff on how Mt. Sinai was run along with some of the difficulties that the staff has encountered through the years.
Mt. Sinai is a private non for profit, safety net acute teaching hospital. Don’t worry my previous sentence sounded like a foreign language to you, at first we didn’t understand it either. We have learned that a safety net hospital is a hospital that accepts everyone even if you don’t have an insurance provider. One of the ways that hospitals gets paid for is through insurance companies. Unfortunately for Mt. Sinai they are responsible for treating many people without insurance due to their location in the city. This has limited them on the amount of money they are able to save and spend towards renovations for the hospital and other clinical care centers. And this is where we get to the patient rooms.
Because the hospital is so old the patient room are also very dated. Their layout consist of 2 patient beds in one room which is very rare these days. The rooms were so small in fact that in order to move one bed in or out of the room, the other bed would also have to be scooted over. While there were windows leading out onto Douglas Park, there wasn’t really room for much else besides two small chairs in front of each bed for visiting family. The room also included an inboard toilet room which means that the bathroom was directly t your right (or left depending on the room) when you walked in. This design has its pro’s due to the fact that it leaves more room on the exterior wall for lighting, but also con’s due to the fact that it restricts the view of the patients in the room for the nurses. In order for a nurse to check on a patient they have to walk all the way into the room. The extra steps that a nurse has to walk to check on a patient slowly adds up and makes their job just a little less efficient.
During the tour we were informed that design research was being done to see if they were going to be able to change the double patient rooms into single patient rooms. While this could be a potentially expensive switch for Mt. Sinai, it also works in their favor because the current size of their double patient rooms is right around the same size as many newly designed single patient rooms. This means that they really wouldn’t really need to change any of their walls! This is when I really wanted to try and find out more about what patient rooms of the twenty first century looked like.
This led me to a study by the Institute of Medicine, “Crossing the Quality Chasm: A new health system for the twenty-first century”. In this study the institute reported 6 quality aims that ensure patient health, safety, and well being. The first aim on that list was “patient-centeredness”. This category included a few subcategories that they felt needed to be met in order for patients to feel as if they were receiving quality care:
using variable-acuity rooms and single-bed rooms
ensuring sufficient space to accommodate family members
enabling access to health care information
having clearly marked signs to navigate the hospital
The first subcategory mentioned single bed patient rooms showing just how important these kind of designed spaces are for the patient. It is also very important for patients to have space for their families to accompany them. If Mt. Sinai is able to transform their two patient bed rooms into single patient rooms they will have plenty of space to also accommodate family or friends of the patient. Just little changes like that show a large impact on patient health. This is when the element of design really started to set in for me. If as a designer we are able to change just a few of aspects we have the ability to make everyones jobs more efficient in the hospital in turn giving people a shorter stay and making the hospital a little more money.
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