The future of healthcare design

A typical visit to a hospital would have a patient check in at the reception, stay in a waiting area, have their vital signs measured, and then see a consultant in a treatment room. Each touchpoint has a finite capacity, with a limited number of receptionists, waiting rooms, medical equipment, and consultants to service a number of patients – which can vary day to day. 

Designers can observe the throughput of each of these elements and assess how well balanced they are in serving patients’ needs while maximising the facility’s budget. 

How many patients per hour can visit and receive treatment? What elements are defining the overall throughput of the clinical pathway? These are just some questions we can use as jumping off points to make informed design decisions.

Visitors and staff in healthcare facilities have to navigate physical spaces to get to where they need to go, whether it’s to get treatment or perform their duties. 

Patients stop and go to various touchpoints. They sit in multiple waiting areas, pass by rooms through long hallways, travel across different buildings, and talk to multiple staff members along the way. Sometimes they go back and forth between the same spaces.

Healthcare facilities are sporadically busy. There are no set times when activity picks up or slows down. Visitors can come alone, in pairs, or in big groups. People also move through these spaces with different mobility equipment. 

These are all important factors that need to be accounted for when assessing the spatial pathways in healthcare facilities.

To show how understanding movement through clinical and spatial pathways would be practically applied, Simon Weigh highlighted a project that GHD's Movement Strategies team recently delivered for a trust within the National Health Service in the UK. 

As this would be the largest ongoing healthcare infrastructure project in the UK, the client needed assurance that the relative provisions for the different departments would be an efficient use of space and meet expected patient demands. 

The team set out to collect data from an existing facility that was part of the development project. The data would then dictate the level of provisions the project would need. The data collection period took six months of real operational days wherein the team selected the busiest 24 hours. They made on-site observations, interviewed staff, and created a complex patient pathway diagram that mapped out the clinical and spatial pathways that patients took. 

With this kind of insight, we were able to help the client adjust provisions for the healthcare facility to be fit for purpose and reallocate funds to better deliver positive patient health outcomes.

Data collected from direct on-site observations alongside statistical trends gathered from years of experience in the field can be used to model potential pathways for building designs. Advances in technology have also allowed us to run microsimulations using data that illustrates how a facility's users would realistically move through its spaces.

These kinds of computer simulations were demonstrated with the Movement Strategies team's work for Great Ormond Street Hospital in the UK. They ran almost 2,000 simulations, testing various scenarios with visitor group sizes navigating the facility to show the impact of different lift specifications on key metrics such as provisions, budget, and footprint.

How people move through the unique environments of healthcare facilities tells us so much about how we can design such buildings to improve the patient experience and reduce expenses.