The Top 3 Patient Safety Concepts Influencing Hospital Design.

By Jay W. Schneider, Senior Editor

Hospital Building Teams are giving increasing attention to patient safety, and with good reason: The Institute of Medicine reports that as many as 1 out of 27 patients admitted into a hospital is harmed by preventable error, and that 1 out of 500 patients dies as a result of preventable error.

According to The Wall Street Journal , one hospital that set up a toll-free complaint line saw reports of medical errors or near-misses increase from 250 a month to 3,000 a month once an anonymous call-in number was established.

While many healthcare organizations are putting improved patient safety at the top of their list of concerns, Building Teams that specialize in the hospital sector face a dilemma: a lack of hard data to show what design concepts truly improve patient safety and the true costs and benefits of such investments.

BD+C interviewed leading architects and researchers to determine what patient safety designs they advocate and what issues they face when designing healthcare facilities. Their top three patient safety design concepts: 1) design for the caregiving process; 2) design for standardization; and 3) decentralize nursing stations--but proceed with caution.

1. Design for the caregiving processes. Because it is generally assumed that there is a direct correlation between staff performance and patient safety, it would make sense for hospital design to address medical and nursing staff practices and processes. But that's not always the case, says Thomas Wallen, AIA, principal with Gresham Smith & Partners, Nashville.

Wallen and his team are responsible for the design of the $51 million, 80-bed St. Joseph's Hospital in West Bend, Wis., which is considered the nation's first hospital designed specifically to address error-free medical delivery.

"Many environments …