Resilient Design in Healthcare Will Affect Pandemic Response

September 11, 2020 / Dochitect / Design for Infection Control, Design for Resiliency

Commentaries

Publication: HealthTech Magazine
Publication Date: September 11, 2020
Author: Diana Anderson
View article

“Has your company implemented safety strategies when returning to work? One of the most important strategies is to make room for safe socializing and distancing, reducing risks while maintaining comfort. Thank you for sharing, @dochitect!”
– Cindy Dunnavant, SVP of Sales & Marketing, EMI Health

Excerpt: Hospitals have always been places of healing, and the challenges of COVID-19 further underscore the value of evidence-based design to ensure care and continuity. This practice relies on empirical data to inform changes that better position physical and technological infrastructures to handle an evolving pandemic.

Simply put, buildings can protect our health.

Read the full article.

Commentaries

AdvantAge Ontario: Designing the Long-Term Care Home for COVID and Beyond

August 31, 2020 / Dochitect / Design for Geriatrics, Design for Infection Control, Design for Resiliency

Webinar

Webinar Title: Designing the Long-Term Care Home for COVID and Beyond
Webinar Date: August 31, 2020
Organization: AdvantAge Ontario

Monday, August 31, 2020 | 2:00pm – 4:00pm

AdvantAge Ontario is the association of not-for-profit long term care, housing, and services for seniors: “We’ve seen through the pandemic how a long-term care home’s design can acutely influence its ability to prevent and respond to infection outbreaks. But design also affects many other important elements of LTC living. Whether you’re building new, redeveloping, or thinking about adaptations to your existing building, this webinar will equip you with essential knowledge and fresh ideas to consider as you plan. We’ll have a detailed discussion of current design standards and recent changes, what they could mean for your home, and the less understood role of mechanical engineering. Learn about the influence of design on infection control and alternative design approaches that also address other aspects of resident well-being, such as smaller clustered settings. Examples of the impact of design during the pandemic’s spring surge will be reviewed and the implications of provincial funding announcements will be discussed. Bring all your questions for the final part of this timely session.”

Click HERE to access the webinar recording.

Webinars

JHD Podcast – Widening the Lens: Clinical Perspectives on Design Thinking in Public Health

August 20, 2020 / Dochitect / Design for Clinical Staff, Design for Patient Safety, Design for Resiliency, Evidence-Based Design

Presentations

Title: “Widening the Lens: Clinical Perspectives on Design Thinking in Public Health”
Podcast: The Journal of Health Design
Date: August 20, 2020

The Health Design Podcast · Benjamin Bassin, MD, EDAC

The COVID-19 pandemic has created many stressors and challenges across all levels of low to highly resourced health systems. However, it has also shown the incredible number of opportunities for innovation, ingenuity and system re-engineering. This team believe it is time to support a paradigm change and advocate for healthcare’s next big investment: intentional and embedded partnerships between clinicians, designers, and architects with dedicated resources to ensure an effective collaborative environment to help solve healthcare’s greatest challenges.

Read the full editorial article HERE.

Podcasts

Fix Room 16! Designing Healthcare Facilities to be More Resilient & Equitable

May 28, 2020 / Dochitect / Design for Clinical Staff, Design for Infection Control, Design for Resiliency, Health Design & Ethics, The Physician-Architect Model

Presentations

Title: Fix Room 16! Designing Healthcare Facilities to be More Resilient & Equitable
Podcast: Design is Everywhere, Design Museum
Date: May 28, 2020

This is one of the main reasons we’re quarantined, not just to keep ourselves safe from the virus but also to “flatten the curve,” and help our hospitals keep up with a growing number of cases. On this episode we talk about how hospitals are designing solutions for surge capacity and what lessons there are for the future of hospital architecture. Those lessons could be very important as we may see new spikes in COVID-19 and as we must adapt facilities to be equitable for all patients, healthcare workers, and staff. We’re joined by Dr. Diana Anderson, a doctor architect, or Dochitect, currently a geriatric medicine fellow at the University of California, San Francisco; and Dr. Esther Choo, she’s an emergency medicine physician and health services researcher based in Portland, Oregon at Oregon Health & Science University, and she’s the chief medical advisor for a startup called Jupe, which is creating pop-up medical facilities. Plus our weekly dose of good design.

Dochitect co-hosts the Design is Everywhere podcast! Listen HERE.

Podcasts

Covid-19: pandemic healthcare centres should have already existed

April 30, 2020 / Dochitect / Design for Infection Control, Design for Resiliency, Health Design & Ethics, The Physician-Architect Model

Letters to the Editor

Publication: BMJ, Letters to the Editor
Publication Date: April 30, 2020
Authors: Neel Sharma & Diana Anderson
View Letter

Covid-19: pandemic healthcare centres should have already existed

Excerpt: Too little too late are the words being uttered by medical professionals in both the UK and US at the rising numbers of confirmed covid-19 cases and deaths.1 Healthcare architects and engineers support these sentiments given the frantic scramble for adaptive reuse of existing spaces to deliver care.1 Knowing weeks in advance of the global spread of this virus did little to spark momentum in the US and UK health systems to prepare early for what lay ahead.

Read the Letter HERE

Letters to the Editor

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