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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