Designing with the long-term patient in mind

‘Treat the person, not the disease’ has recently become a common mantra in care delivery with Professor Alf Collins and others extolling the importance of ‘person-centred care’. This push to enable people with long term conditions to become more engaged in managing their health and wellbeing is widely believed to improve healthcare outcomes.

Jamie Brewster, Associate Director and architect at MJ Medical, believes that healthcare designers should take a similar approach when they’re developing inpatient spaces. Rather than treating patients as objects, we should enable people to take more control of their care environment.

Practising as a healthcare architect for more than 25 years, Jamie thought he amassed all the knowledge needed to design spaces for inpatient care. However, undergoing extensive treatment for leukaemia in 2020, gave him fresh insight and made him realise he may have overlooked some critical issues.

So much emphasis is placed by architects on the object qualities of inpatient space with aesthetics, ergonomics, and compliance with standards dominating their considerations. Little attention is paid to the long-term patient experience and how the sensory environment affects wellness, healing, and recovery. Jamie’s experience amplified patients’ desperate need for peace and quiet, access to fresh air, and the ability to control room temperatures and lighting. All factors he would not have previously ranked as important.

As part of his PhD, Jamie is looking at the room design requirements of inpatients who, due to their condition or treatment are admitted for extended periods. Within his work, he’ll consider their needs in detail, as well as why they may have been overlooked by designers. Jamie will consider whether traditional processes should be refreshed with more patient centric design exploration.