ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN
Stantec has been involved in the design of a number of cancer centres, such as the Guy’s & St Thomas’ Cancer Centre in London.
accommodation for patients with similar clinical requirements. The exception to this is the specialist units for patients with varied physical conditions who also have dementia. Rather than designing inpatient accommodation around communal wards, however, the most commonly adopted model for new-build inpatient care is for single occupancy rooms. While it is less space-efficient and more costly to build than the traditional communal ward model, this design strategy supports patient wellbeing by affording individuals increased privacy and greater opportunities for uninterrupted sleep. It also reduces infection risk, and enables more thorough infection control regimes, for a safer, more efficient, hospital environment. However, for patient groups with less acute conditions, there remains a question mark over whether the positive benefits of single occupancy accommodation really do outweigh the potential negatives.
Gender separation and socialisation In the drive to prioritise treatment pathways, privacy, and infection control, however, two fundamental areas of cultural diversity risk being overlooked. The first is gender separation: although each patient has their own room, the common areas in the ward are usually mixed, which does not truly address the needs of cultures where women remain covered in the presence of men. The second area is socialisation, or rather, the lack of it. With the provision of bedside entertainment, and the availability of en-suite toilet and washing facilities, there is no incentive for patients to leave the social isolation of their private room. If we consider that a lack of gender segregation in the common areas, and a lack of space for social gatherings within their own patient area, compound this isolation, it is clear that common, progressive patient accommodation models are far from inclusive for cultures built on social
interaction. Paradoxically, therefore, in some patient environments the single occupancy rooms designed to support improved wellbeing could actually be detrimental – by exacerbating disconnectedness from the outside world. Stantec’s work on major hospital projects in Qatar and Abu Dhabi highlights the cultural differences between the expectations of patients and healthcare providers in the UK, as opposed to those in the Arabic world. Whereas we accept the limits placed on the number of visitors to a bed, and have little choice in doing so, due to a lack of space and seating, in the Gulf states the ability for the patient to remain involved in social gatherings during their stay in hospital is embedded in hospital design, layout, and space allocation, because it is culturally integral to their wellbeing. At our Abu Dhabi project, there is even provision for ‘VIP’ patient accommodation in the wings of patient rooms that splay out from the
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Email
healthcare@ascom.co .uk Call 0121 502 8906
Visit
www.ascom.com/uk August 2019 Health Estate Journal 31
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