Safer, Green Designs
Success stories
Visit Green Corner to read success stories on green design and construction.
Design for safety resources
- Patient safety
- 21st century design Webcast
- Built environment
- Green building material alternatives
- Green guidelines for healthcare construction
- Surge Capacity
Patient safety principles drive new hospital design
AHRQ Designing hospitals for safety
A free DVD from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, “Transforming Hospitals: Designing for Safety and Quality”, reviews evidence-based hospital design and how it increases patient and staff satisfaction and safety, quality of care, employee retention, and results in a positive return on investment.
Key concepts of evidence-based design in a hospital include single-patient rooms, the use of noise reducing construction materials, easily accessible work stations, and improved layout for patients and staff. Patient safety issues addressed are falls, hospital-acquired infections, and medical errors. The cases of three hospitals that have incorporated evidence-based design elements in their construction and renovation are presented in the DVD. To order the DVD go to http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/transform.htm.
Download Transforming Hospitals summary (.pdf) (419KB)
Governance Meeting 2008
Safe and Green Healthcare Design - What is the Return on Investment?
Blair L. Sadler JD Former President and CEO Rady Children's Hospital, San Diego and Vice Chair Center for Health Design and
Gina Pugliese, Vice President , Safety Institute, Premier Inc.
- Slides: Sadler (908 kb) and Pugliese (338 kb)
- Audio: Safe and Green Healthcare Design - (mp3) (11mb)
St. Joseph, West Bend
A Wisconsin regional healthcare system has designed its new hospital to promote a culture of patient safety. West Bend, WI-based St. Joseph’s Community Hospital assembled a multi-departmental team of architects, patients, families, hospital staff, physicians and local citizens to design a hospital that would be safety driven from the ground up. The design, described in a special article from the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Safety, includes standardized patient rooms, new technology that will help minimize falls, and patient care alcoves in each patient room. Additional design principles for the new facility include visibility of patients to staff, automation such as bar-coding of medications, and noise reduction. The hospital was designed to be adaptable and flexible and allow for future growth. It should be noted that this has been a developing process and today would include an “ICRA” as part of the process.
Download the free article by Reiling (.pdf) (369 KB) from the Joint Commission.
Webcast - Designing the 21st century hospital
A Webcast, "Designing the 21st Century Hospital: Serving Patients and Staff," is available from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). The webcast features researchers, design professionals, and hospital leaders presenting and discussing how hospitals of the future should be built, organized, and managed to maximize patient safety and outcomes and improve staff performance and satisfaction. Featured are up-to-the-minute evidence-based design concepts for healthcare buildings. With an anticipated $20 billion in new hospital construction and major renovations projected annually for the next decade, the central question of the conference was how hospitals' physical design, operating systems, and "corporate culture" affect patients, staff, and hospitals' bottom line.
2006
Designing the 21st Century Hospital: Environmental Leadership for Healthier Patients and Facilities
The program, "Designing the 21st Century Hospital: Environmental Leadership for Healthier Patients and Facilities," was held on September 28-29, 2006, in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J.
Download a summary of all the presentations (.pdf) (637 KB). An archived webcast record of the speakers' presentations and discussions as well as an article from the Wall Street Journal Article "Focuses on 'Green' Hospitals" is also available at this site. The article draws on issues discussed at a Foundation-sponsored meeting to examine ways to design eco-friendly facilities.
http://www.rwjf.org/newsroom/activitydetail.jsp?id=10182&type=
2004
Download a summary of the proceedings:
Designing the 21 Century
Hospital
(.pdf) (500 KB), or go to:
http://www.rwjf.org/files/publications/other/Design21CenturyHospital.pdf
Download a major presentation:
The Role of the Physical
environment
(.pdf) (320 KB), or go to:
http://www.rwjf.org/files/publications/other/RoleofthePhysicalEnvironment.pdf
Play the webcast 21st Century hospital design, go to:
http://www.rwjf.org/newsroom/activitylist.jsp
and select "Archives 2004," the webcast is dated June 7, 2004.
Resources addressing the built environment and
patient safety
Evidence for innovation -Transforming children’s health through the physical environment. NACHRI –CHD Executive summary
Sadler BL, Joseph A. Evidence for innovation -Transforming children’s health through the physical environment. The National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions. May, 2008.
Download NACHRI executive summary (.pdf) (704 KB)
Using Evidence-Based Environmental Design to Enhance Safety and Quality IHI-CHD
Sadler BL, Joseph A, Keller A, Rostenberg B. Using Evidence-Based Environmental Design to Enhance Safety and Quality. IHI Innovation Series White paper. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Institute for Healthcare Improvement; 2009. (Also available on
www.IHI.org)
Download IHI paper (pdf) (214 KB)
Sound control for improved outcomes in healthcare settings - CHD issues paper
17-page Issues paper by Anjali Joseph, Ph.D. and Roger Ulrich, Ph.D. The Center for Health Design. January, 2007.
Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Download Sound
Control issues paper (.pdf) (367 KB)
How Hospital Design Saves Lives
"Design changes can cut infection rates, lower physician errors, improve staff performance, and make all the difference in delivering care."
This headline in Business Week, August 15, 2006, by Andrew Blum highlights
how the increasing use of evidence-based design in healthcare facilities,
integrating clinical and environmentally friendly data, has had a major impact
on patient and environmental safety. Go to:
Business Week (8/15/06)
Environmental design, worker safety and patient outcomes.
Organizational and environmental
factors that affect worker health and safety and patient outcomes (.doc) (406 KB)
In American Journal of Infection Control. April 2002; (30) pp. 93-106.
Green building material alternatives
Green building: Alternatives to polyvinyl chloride (PVC) building materials for health care; Pub-33
This chart provides contact information and alternative materials for the products listed below:
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This publication is part of Going Green: A Resource Kit for Pollution Prevention in Health Care. Ver: October 6, 2008
Green buildings alternatives (.pdf)(314 KB)
Complete resource kit available at: www.noharm.org/goinggreen.
Toxic chemicals in building materials- An overview for health care organizations
The 14 page Fact Sheet briefly describes the reasons for health concerns from the chemicals listed below and is useful for providing essential background when selecting safer, environmentally sustainable materials.
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The final summary provides a valuable "Green materials hierarchy for healthcare", describing four criteria to consider during the selection process.
Fact Sheet Toxic Chemicals (.pdf)(320KB)
Available at www.healthybuilding.net/index.html
Green guidelines for healthcare construction
Green Guide for Health Care Version 2.2 January 31, 2007
The GGHC is a 169 page metric tool for evaluation health and sustainability of building design, construction, maintenance and operations for healthcare industry. It is convened by the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, sponsored by the Hospitals for a Healthy Environment (H2E) and the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA) and funded by the Merck Family Fund. The GGHC follows the credit structure of LEED™ (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).
This tool will help evaluate the health and sustainability of building design, construction, maintenance and operations for the healthcare industry. It uses a scoring system modeled after the U. S. Green Building Council's (USGBC) LEED™ rating system, but is self-certifying. (LEED is an acronym for Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design.) The GGHC was originally built on the Green Healthcare Construction Guidance Statement developed by the American Society of Healthcare Engineering (ASHE) in 2002 and since revised October 2004. It addresses the particular structural, usage, and regulatory challenges of healthcare buildings and emphasizes environmental and public health issues. Although the GGHC focuses on institutional occupancies such as acute care hospitals, its principles can be applied to a wide range of healthcare facilities. It is applicable to new freestanding facilities, additions to existing facilities coupled with renovation, and extensive rehabilitation and adaptive reuse projects.
- Download Green Guide for Health Care Construction from:
http://www.gghc.org - More information on Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED):
http://www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CategoryID=19 - Download the 2004 ASHE Green Healthcare Construction Guidance Statement (.pdf) (41 KB)
Surge capacity and building design - JCAHO; JCR
The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and its affiliate Joint Commission Resources (JCR) released a free web-based publication on surge hospitals in December, 2005. Surge hospitals are designed to assist the community in absorbing an overwhelming number of patients seeking care during emergencies, such as mass-casualty events or infectious disease outbreaks. Surge hospitals provide care when permanent facilities exhaust their capacity or cannot operate because of damage or other conditions This guide describes the different possibilities, such as shuttered hospitals, closed wards in existing hospitals, and mobile facilities, and the design considerations for each. It explores the challenges of planning for, establishing and operating surge hospitals, such as obtaining sufficient staff, supplies and equipment and providing safe care.
Surge Hospitals: Providing Safe Care in Emergencies (.pdf) (348 KB)
Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) "Airborne Infectious Disease Management Manual – Methods for Temporary Negative Pressure Isolation"
This user guide was written to assist hospitals in developing strategies for temporary negative pressure isolation and provides instruction on the use of equipment used for airborne infectious disease management. Preventative maintenance schedules and a sample log for measuring particle counts are included for performance improvement planning. Additional information including slides for training are located at the Web site below.
Download manual (.pdf) (3 MB)
http://www.health.state.mn.us/oep/training/bhpp/isolation.html
Surge Capacity - MERET- Minnesota Emergency Preparedness Education and Training
The MERET site has six modules including one on isolation and one on how to develop Temporary Negative Pressure rooms (TNP).
http://cpheo1.sph.umn.edu/meret