Is sustainability the wrong word? Reclaiming people-first healthcare design

With growing concerns about an accelerating climate crisis, many conversations around sustainable design focus solely on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonization, and natural resource conservation. While those are certainly necessary goals, they tend to constrain design perspectives, particularly in healthcare settings where energy efficiency is less visible than more occupant-centric design strategies. 

Organizations and design teams can easily get trapped in semantics, adopting too narrow of a view. And because these “traditional” metrics can be overwhelming to achieve in healthcare, sometimes the word “sustainability” has become loaded and disempowering.
Sustainable design isn’t about supporting a healthy planet merely for the planet’s sake, it’s about preserving a hospitable world for all of us to thrive in, supporting our health and well-being. There’s tremendous opportunity for deploying human-centered healthcare design with proven benefits aside from energy efficiency, including improving patient outcomes and workforce retention—two of the biggest priorities in the industry.

Patient comfort improves health outcomes

It’s been well-documented that reducing patient stress aids in healing and improves the overall patient experience. In fact, biophilic design has been shown to reduce hospitalization time and patient mortality, lower perceived pain levels, and support faster recovery.

In acute or long-term care settings, this can be achieved through simple strategies like placing windows at the patient’s bedside eye level or incorporating outdoor spaces that provide access to fresh air and sunshine to promote better mood, positive thinking, and physical healing.

Another option is to leverage the on-stage/off-stage model of design, creating infrastructure and workflows that physically separate operational logistics and hospital services from patient spaces.  This insulates patients and visitors from the frenetic hustle and bustle of daily operations, offering patients and visitors a calm, peaceful respite.
Induction flows for surgical centers can infuse a level of comfort and calm for patients, especially in children’s facilities.

This approach uses comfortable bedroom-style spaces for intake and pre-op where anesthesia is administered before the patient is moved to the operating room, and the same or similar space used for post-op recovery. This way, they never have to see the overwhelming mechanical and sterile environment of the OR, reducing the trauma and fear of the surgical process.

Workplace elements improve staff wellbeing

With lives on the line, healthcare workers face some of the most overwhelming stress and work incredibly long hours. Yet most staff break rooms are very sanitized and utilitarian, and in many cases, particularly in imaging, lab, and diagnostics, staff are confined to windowless rooms for a 12-hour shift.

Here again, biophilic design can reduce stress for healthcare providers and offer a respite for them to rest and recharge. In fact, caregivers are more productive and organized in spaces with plants, natural air and light, and interaction with nature. Exposure to outdoor spaces and natural design elements not only lowers stress levels but it also reduces sick days and the risk of patient harm, while boosting collaboration, workplace satisfaction, morale and attendance. All those factors contribute to a high-performance workplace and can have a significant positive impact on recruiting and retention.

It sounds simple, but when you create a space where someone would choose to be, more people will be delighted to be there more often.

Modular design supports facility efficiency

Sustainability also means long-lasting. But with healthcare needs and capacity constantly changing, facilities need modular designs that can adapt and scale. Most don’t have time or budget for years-long remodeling projects, and they can’t have service disruptions while they re-configure spaces.

COVID highlighted this need for flexibility as demand for med-surg beds exploded. But now, the forecast is for demand to decrease as providers and insurers move toward specialty care and accelerated discharge. That means facilities may need to convert unused patient rooms to imaging or surgical suites and back again if another public health emergency erupts.

Planning rooms for universal design provides adaptability to meet these flexible needs. Instead of creating unique layouts for office spaces and clinical rooms, both are designed with the same basic shell and infrastructure to support interchangeability.

At the same time, facilities must also consider workflows, travel distances, and lean design options that support operational efficiency. These modular designs give facilities the ability to experiment with changing flows to maximize efficiency without the time, cost, or disruption of major construction.

Flexible infrastructure enhances utilization

Modular spaces are only usable if the required infrastructure is available, and this is often a limiting factor in facility flexibility. From electrical, mechanical and plumbing to IT and med gas, having the right utilities where they’re needed is critical to hospital operations. Besides availability, variances in licensing also dictate specifics for what’s required in each application.  

Incorporating flexible infrastructure from the start can help overcome these hurdles in new facilities and down the road, at a much lower cost. Designs based on structural grids with universal floor-to-ceiling heights can accommodate various equipment needs and prevent single-use or restricted use facilities. Although often avoided due to higher initial costs, additional riser shafts with embedded utilities can provide extra distribution points for medical gases, power, or water, making future modifications or adaptations to the space significantly easier, faster, and more cost-effective. This approach achieves sustainability by maximizing utilization and efficiency and reducing waste.

People-first design is sustainable design

There’s no doubt that climate change is a public health issue because extreme heat, bad air quality, and drought are all inherently bad for humans. However, we must not get stultified by an “all or nothing approach,” giving up on sustainable design when solving the global climate crisis seems too overwhelming for an individual project to take on. There are other microcosmic, issues that healthcare facilities can address with direct and immediate impact, such as the health and wellbeing of the users which are essential aspects of design excellence.

The use of biophilic elements, forward-thinking modularity and universal design concepts can create utilization efficiency, reduce future costs, and minimize waste, while enhancing the healing process through comforting spaces.

It is possible to simultaneously address the health, humanity, and comfort of building occupants alongside the durability, longevity, and flexibility of spaces for maximum efficiency. Involving human-centered design from the start prioritizes the human experience while keeping conventional sustainability top of mind.