Hospital Design Blog

If you are familiar with what the CDC requires for different types of protection such as  “contact precaution”― there are different levels of precaution depending on what the pathogens are―and some of them require caregivers to don something akin to a space suit including headgear that has a battery pack and breathing apparatus.  Where are you going to store all of that?  You don’t want to have an ugly cart that looks like it came from Sears Roebuck with that stuff outside the door, yet the caregivers can’t run down the corridor to a decentralized supply room to get it.  Where are you going to locate all that?  At this time I don’t see anybody addressing this.  Now we have all these multi-drug resistant infections that every hospital is dealing with and it’s a major problem that’s very hard to control.  There needs to be something in the corridor, perhaps built into the wall, for storage of personal protection equipment.  You can’t keep these supplies in the room in a nurse server because they will become contaminated.

I did hundreds of interviews for this book with architects, chief nurse executives, and unit managers who brought up some very interesting points.  One nurse said, “Sometimes we use inhalers with medications that are not a single dose,” and she asked, “Where do I put something like that?  I can’t just put it back in the Pyxis cabinet and I can’t put it in a drawer; it has to be locked.  And if it’s inside the drawer, is it contaminating the inside of that drawer?”  She said there are so many things that architects and designers are not addressing that have an impact on infection control.  As I interviewed a lot of nurses and talked to them about their day-to-day needs, in all the projects I’m personally involved in and all the projects that I collected, I don’t see people dealing with these issues effectively.  I still see a kind of generic patient room and nursing unit layout that doesn’t address the specific needs of infection control which are not going to go away soon and they may never go away.

(Excerpts from an interview with Patient Safety Design expert, Jain Malkin regarding her book, A Visual Reference for Evidence-Based Design, published by The Center for Health Design, 2008; View the video – Hospital Planning – Why is patient safety and design so important)