Why hospitals are moving away from keeping patients in beds
Basic elements of hospital design—such as patient rooms, hallways and how many operating rooms a facility has versus childbirth facilities—will be challenged in the coming years, wrote Neel Shah, MD, MPP, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School.
In his POLITICO piece titled “The Case Against Hospital Beds,” Shah said some hospitals are working around immediate shortcomings of the design of many facilities, like outdoor gardens and walking trails to help patients avoid excessive bedrest. Other sites of care, such as ambulatory surgical centers and skilled nursing facilities, are emphasizing this newer, less bed-focused approach.
Redesigning facilitieswill be taxing, he wrote, both on hospital finances and on the entrenched models of care delivery.
“The more we know about healing, the more it appears that health care spaces will need a different approach—one that sometimes looks more like a park than a long fluorescent hallway full of beds,” Shah wrote.
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John joined TriMed in 2016, focusing on healthcare policy and regulation. After graduating from Columbia College Chicago, he worked at FM News Chicago and Rivet News Radio, and worked on the state government and politics beat for the Illinois Radio Network. Outside of work, you may find him adding to his never-ending graphic novel collection.