Involvement & Mutual Understanding in the design process of the patient rooms

Abstract

This thesis describes a process to accomplish the following goal; to enhance the communication between stakeholders during the design process of the patient’s room en thereby improving the patient’s room interior design to the advantage of all stakeholders. An explorative research was done, in the form of literature studies, observations and interviews on the following critical areas which have most impact on the patient’s room interior design; trends in the design of the patient’s room, the stakeholders and their involvement, and the existing and promising design process methods. Introduced from the United States are the Evidence Based Design and the Healing Environment principles. These withhold the principle of the healing aspects surroundings can have on the well-being of patients. Although these principles are promising, they solely look at quantitative research. To design patient’s rooms which meet the stakeholders’ (latent) needs the stakeholders should be included in the design process. If looked at the existing stakeholder involvement in the design process, Dutch hospitals claim to be patient-centered. However, from the interviews with different hospitals dealing with new real estate, patients are only sparsely directly involved in the design process. Again hospitals only look at quantitative research in their design of the patient’s room. To be truly patient-centered one not has to look at the patient, but has to look at the patient’s needs. This is only possible by doing research with the patient. Due to the fact the organization of hospitals is complex and opaque, the process of building hospitals can take years. Because there are multiple stakeholders each having influence and decision power, makes the communication during the design process difficult, resulting not beneficial for the interior design of the patient’s room. To achieve the goal a Design Support is developed to help the interior designer with the design process in order to enhance the communication and therefore the mutual understanding of the stakeholders. The Support allows the interior designer setting up a design process according to a user-centered design method (SPARC). The Support also allows specific subjects to be researched on specific stakeholders. The Support also should increase the involvement of the stakeholders and thereby build up mutual understanding between the stakeholders. In an evaluative research with open interviews the concept of the Support was addressed to different stakeholders to see what they thought of it. Adjustments to the Support still need to be made in order to increase the usability. The Design support enhances the communication and mutual understanding on three different levels. By including the different stakeholders during the design process the stakeholders are forced to think about the others. By implementing and showing the different outcomes in the design, the stakeholders see the other side. By showing the entire process step by step, the stakeholders can see why the different steps need to be done in order to get a proper outcome. Although the concept of the Design Support is promising, the interior designer should do further research and testing in order for the Design Support to work properly. However, with implementing the Design Support in the building processes of hospitals, hopefully hospitals can get truly patient-centered and future hospitals will be a more comfortable place to stay in for both staff and patient.