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  Topic: Healthcare beds
  Topic: Hospital beds
 "Health and Design": the sick room as a health-promoting factor.


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Patients are more and more turning into customers. He or she places certain expectations on the hospital, and the extent to which they are fulfilled or not determine to a considerable degree his or her satisfaction with the service provided. In this respect, there cannot be determined any differences between patients and other customer groups any more.

Asking patients' satisfaction also from this point of view, doctors will be at the top of the rating scale, followed by nursing staff, treatment success and then coming in, even before medical-technical equipment and feeding, right in fourth place - the type of accommodation. Additionally asking for any need for change, the issue of accommodation comes in first. If the patient is to be considered as a customer, and when he or she sees the greatest need for change in accommodation, then the issue of switching to a different equipment is perfectly right.

However, this issue must also be raised for quite different reasons. Because psychologists, hospital planners, interior designers and designers have long since thought about the therapeutic significance of the room and recognized the interaction of "Design and Health". Studies have shown that patients need to have control over their physical environment. If this is not the case, the patient will suffer from various types of stress. Wellness factors and a psychosocially supporting environment can counteract this process. Apart from stress-reducing characteristics, the quality of the physical environment has an impact on many aspects of the psychological and social well-being. Scientific studies carried out during the last decade show a clear connection between psychologically unsuitable design and bad health symptoms like anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, insomnia as well as an increased need for painkillers.

Or just the other way round. The American Center for Health Design with its Pebble project, in which numerous hospitals and institutes participate worldwide, has been documenting for nearly ten years now the success of the idea that design can be utilized to create a healing environment. Here is only one example: With the foundation of the "Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute" at the Wayne State University in Detroit, managers, planners and designers were given the chance to initiate cancer treatment not in the form of disease treatment but as a wellness program instead. The outlines of sick rooms were optimized, the latter were furnished like a hotel room and fitted out in a way so that friends could also spend the night there. It was found that patients moved from the old building into the new center needed 54% fewer painkillers, wrong medications were decreased by 37% while patients' satisfaction grew by 17%. And turnover of nursing staff dropped from 23% to just under 4%.

This data stems from only one institute that employs design in the hospital for the benefit of patients and nursing staff and thus also as an investment into the future.

Good to know that there are manufacturers of hospital beds and nursing care facilities that have devoted themselves to this idea like the Völker AG, for example. The furnishing proposals of this brand let sick rooms become a place for recovery in which patients will really feel fine. A place, where nursing staff will work in a highly motivated way, and by means of which the commonly accepted definition that health is the combined state of physical, psychological and social well-being can be proven again day by day.

Press contact:
ProSell! Werbeagentur GmbH
Leisewitzstraße 39a
30175 Hannover
Mrs Katja Linkert
Phone: +49 511 / 28 35 7-32
Fax: +49 511 / 28 35 7-18
E-Mail: katja.linkert@prosell-hannover.de