The Center for Health Design (CHD) in conjunction with the Facilitiy Guidelines Institute (FGI) and Virtua Health, was recently awarded funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to address the significant need for patient safety to be integrated into healthcare facility design standards.
Medication errors, patient falls and healthcare acquired infections are a serious problem in U.S. hospitals, and worldwide. Research shows that healthcare physical environment factors such as noise, poor lighting, inadequate ventilation and building layout and design contribute to these negative outcomes in healthcare. In response to this, CHD and FGI will use the grant funds from AHRQ to create safer healthcare environments by developing methods to enable careful consideration of built environment factors during the design and construction of healthcare facilities.
The project begins with the research – by completing a literature review on existing tools and approaches for incorporating patient safety in the design process. The research team, including Anjali Joseph, Xiaobo Quan and Ellen Taylor, expects to identify some key tools and approaches that may be relevant in the design process. The materials developed as a result of the literature review then informs the work for the following seminar portion of this project.
The next part of the project brings together experts and specialists at an invitation-only seminar titled, “Designing for Patient Safety,” on October 11 and 12, 2011 at Virtua Health in New Jersey. The seminar participants will form workgroups organized around the different phases in the healthcare facility design process. The workgroups will be charged with engaging in an in-depth conversation about the most effective approaches to ensuring that patient safety concerns are integrated into the healthcare facility design process; then developing a framework for a new patient safety risk assessment tool for the healthcare facility design team including healthcare administrators, facility management professionals, clinicians and architects to utilize at the most relevant phases of the design process. Learn more about the event >
Finally, the patient safety risk assessment tool developed by the workgroup is intended for inclusion in the 2014 FGI Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities.