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Article of the week: Top 10 ways to make your facility a homier dwelling

Contemporary Long-Term Care Weekly, February 28, 2008

Architects give inexpensive ideas

Buy versus build: Those aren't your only options to bring your skilled nursing facility (SNF) into the era of resident-centered care. Nursing homes can make their buildings feel more like home and less like a healthcare facility, and still not spend a ton of money.

The first step is to perform a facility assessment, says Daniel Cinelli, managing principal architect in the Chicago offices of Perkins Eastman. Start by determining the time period in which the facility was designed.

In the 1960s, the nurses' stations were centrally located with dining rooms at the ends of the halls. This style came from the Civil War era when nurses needed a central set-up to see when soldiers threw their boots in the hallway, alerting staff that they were needed, Cinelli says.

A decade later, nursing home design took on more of a neighborhood feel with roughly 60 beds and one dining room per floor. More recently, the style has become a double-loaded corridor of resident rooms and a central common space.

Creativity must come into play to help these types of facilities evolve into homier environments without tearing down walls. SNFs that want to stay at the forefront of national trends should take the necessary steps to be homier because of the increased attraction that it gives to potential clientele and the improved quality of life that it offers to current residents, says Cinelli.

A good number of SNFs make upgrades every few years, but they only take it to a certain level, says Michael Allen-Hall, principal architect at Noekler & Hull in Chambersburg, PA. "We all talk about making homelike changes, but in the end, the remodeling doesn't look like your home," he says.

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