• E-mail
• Print
• RSS
• Buy It Now
• Reprints

Patient safety by hospital design

Patient Safety Monitor, February 1, 2009

This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Patient Safety Monitor.

Evidence-based design improves care

Dublin (OH) Methodist Hospital has not had a hospital-acquired infection since it opened January 8, 2008. Lamont Yoder, RN, MSN, MBA, FACHE, chief nursing officer, attributes the hospital’s infection control success not only to its staff members’ compliance, but also to the physical environment in which they work every day.

“Private rooms are not just for the luxury of having a private room,” says Yoder. “They’re actually for the [patient] outcome afterward.”

Private rooms are not the only design element helping Yoder keep his hospital a safe place to heal. Dublin Methodist was designed with consultation from the Center for Health Design (CHD), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization that conducts research to guide hospitals on best design practices for healthcare organizations.

Hundreds of research reports conducted by the center gathered evidence on the effect of healthcare design on patient care, quality, outcome, and safety. One of those reports includes Bronson Methodist Hospital in Kalamazoo, MI, which changed its rooms from all semiprivate to a combination of semiprivate and private in 2000. The hospital saw infection rates for the entire facility drop by 11%; infection rates in units that changed from semiprivate to private dropped by 45%.

This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Patient Safety Monitor.

• Comment
• E-mail to a Colleague
• Print
• RSS
• Archive
• Buy It Now
• Reprints / Permissions

Comments