See Inside a Hospital Designed by Patients
Date Posted: December 22, 2020
Posted In: Ideas,
From Fast Company: It’s a unique challenge to design a place where no one wants to end up. When the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston started making plans several years ago to redesign its children’s ward—a facility where premature babies get ventilated in the intensive care unit and children with cancer endure the slow trauma of a life in treatment—its leaders decided early on that the new building needed a design that was as empathetic as possible to patients and families who would rather be anywhere else.
“This is not an environment that is on anybody’s life plan when they’re building a family,” says Dr. Mark Scheurer, a pediatric cardiologist and MUSC’s chief medical officer. “So how do you take that, say it out loud, think about it, and create an environment that actually makes them feel warm and that adjusts to the fact that this is their new normal? How do you do that thoughtfully?”
The way, Scheurer and others decided, was to put patients and families at the center of the design process, along with hospital staff and doctors, to guide the development of the new building—even before an architect had been hired. “We hijacked the process of designing the building unapologetically,” Scheurer says.
The result is a new 10-story, 250-bed facility that opened earlier this year, just before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. It has been nearly a decade in the works, and started with the hospital’s administration reaching out to the families of patients to set up a kind of design steering committee called the Patient Family Advisory Council.
One of the first people they contacted was Kelly Loyd, a woman who had spent a lot of time at the previous facility. When she was 42, Loyd gave birth to twin girls more than 11 weeks premature. Months of treatments, surgeries, ventilation, and ICU care ensued, and though Loyd’s two daughters eventually emerged from the hospital healthy, the experience gave her some insight into the hospital’s design shortcomings, from the awkward location of its bathrooms to the lack of privacy between ICU bays that often held dying children and grieving parents. “It’s a really difficult place,” she says.