SAN FRANCISCO—Gensler, the world’s largest designer and architecture firm, recently published a study called “Transforming Healthcare,” whose aim was to examine the potential means for healthcare construction and future clinical layouts amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Gensler’s Health & Wellness division commissioned the study as well as interviewed field experts to determine precisely what the healthcare environment will look like as the world comes to terms with a new reality for treating patients in the clinical setting, where safety and separation of patients from medical staff has taken on a new urgency thanks to the transmissibility of the COVID-19 virus.

According to the study, it is now incumbent upon healthcare facilities to foster “an environment that feels safe and [makes] patients and employees feel valued, while re-confirming that their health matters.” Accordingly, the next step in healthcare delivery will require not returning to the status quo of the pre-COVID times, but rather necessitate taking the approach that “this disruption is an opportunity to reimagine the delivery of care.”

If high-volume patient care is ever to be viable again, Gensler found that “a carefully choreographed course of immediate actions and long-term efforts” will be needed. This will require not only a refocus on the part of clinicians, but also reassuring patients and their families that it is safe to even visit a hospital for care. “The strategy of getting patients and staff back into clinical environments is to reduce fear, rebuild trust, reassure, and communicate clearly how their well-being is considered,” Gensler’s study found.

The best defense against hospital-wide infection is a good offense, the study’s authors advise, which can be accomplished in redesigned healthcare environments through such common-sense measures as distancing workstations adequately, employing one-way airflow, extensive hand-sanitizing stations and adjusting staff and patient-arrival schedules to a more phased approach.

Gensler advises redesigning the physical layout of healthcare spaces to better facilitate a reduction in contact in waiting areas and examination rooms. Contactless interactions and “smart building technologies” are recommended as well.

Key to the success of any such future endeavors is that hospitals and other healthcare spaces take a systemic approach to enhance the patient experience as well as reduce the chances of cross-contamination and infections being spread in the clinical setting.

Furthemore, Gensler’s study found that the public has greatly shed its confidence in the ability of healthcare spaces to foster this very kind of safe atmosphere. Correspondingly, the audit advises that it will be incumbent upon healthcare settings to not only reconfigure their spaces to head off disease transmission but also to restore “lost confidence” that the coronavirus pandemic has made endemic in much of the public when it comes to feeling safe in a healthcare setting. Gensler said that designers should therefore focus on creating what they call “Humane Healthcare” that addresses those very concerns.

The June report from Gensler, commissioned under the firm’s Global Health & Wellness department, carries recommendations not just for Gensler properties but for all those firms that work in the healthcare sector moving forward.

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CLEVELAND — We all recognize that hospitals are designed to help heal patients; but what if they could also be designed to help heal communities? This is the question MetroHealth is attempting to answer with the unveiling of its latest hospital transformation plan.

MetroHealth has begun a nearly $800 million project with Minneapolis-based HGA Architecture, converting half of the county health system’s main campus on West 25^th Street into open green space with connections to the nearby Towpath Trail and other amenities. With this connective design, MetroHealth aims to bolster community wellness as the hospital becomes a major open and active space that can be used by everyone for activity to promote health and community engagement.

With only one to two acres of green space on the campus, this transformation will ultimately transform 25 acres of the 52-acre campus into green space, with the designs’ bottom-line ensuring the makeover of a gray and crowded campus into what they are calling a “hospital in a park.”

Hospital in a Park

The key features of this transformation plan include the installment of a roughly six- to eight-acre park along West 25^th Street, west of Scranton Road and south of MetroHealth Drive, with the space now occupied by the fortress-like Outpatient Plaza, a garage and treatment facility built in 1992. With a new hospital bed tower situated on the southern edge of the campus, MetroHealth would build a new Ambulatory Care Center and an extensive MetroHealth Wellness Gardens.

The MetroHealth Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Center, a nursing home built in 2000 that now inhabits the future site of the wellness gardens, would be removed and replaced by a new tower on the north side of the campus at West 25^th Street and Sackett Avenue. The northeast corner of the campus, now dominated by surface parking, would also become a collection of park-like spaces, with covered parking and indoor walkways making it so patients and visitors will not have to walk outside. The new layout reduces patient and visitor walking distance by 40 percent and eliminates almost all surface parking, according to a statement. Walkways throughout the campus will also include a looped path connected to the Towpath trail.

“We are creating schematic designs right now, and one of our key features is the way we’re creating ‘process neutral design’ that makes the building flexible and adaptable for the future,” said Walter Jones, MetroHealth’s senior vice president of campus transformation. “We know from research- and evidence-based design that views and access to open space and nature is beneficial for patient recovery and recuperation.”

Jones also explained that the implementation of “process neutral design” allows the creation of systems that will be adaptive, efficient and effective when the main campus opens, and for many years thereafter. In return, this design will not only beautify the campus with its trail connection and expanded green acreage, but it will also extend its benefits to surrounding neighbors.

“We’ll be able to incorporate therapies and arts in medicine programming into patients’ healing regimens. The health benefits aren’t just for patients. They’ll extend to anyone who lives, works and plays nearby,” said Jones.

This project plays a role in MetroHealth’s effort to strengthen its West 25^th neighborhood, including forming the CCH Development Corp. and an effort to turn the neighborhood into the world’s first hospital led, EcoDistrict, according to a statement. MetroHealth believes that its campus updates will not only improve care but could spur revitalization in Cleveland as well, CEO Akram Boutros, M.D., told a local newspaper.

“We’re committed to making this a community to be enjoyed by its current residents, but also we have to be committed to bringing new people in,” Boutrous said. “Otherwise this neighborhood is not sustainable as it is with so many vacant and underutilized properties.”

Construction has already begun and is expected to be completed by 2022.

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TOMAH, Wis. — Tomah Memorial Hospital in Tomah has plans to begin construction of a new $66 million hospital this fall. Tomah Memorial first announced the project last spring, and plans are currently underway an estimated 140,000-square-foot, three-story hospital and proposed medical office building that would be attached to the hospital.

The project is currently slated for completion by 2019, according to Tim Sessions, AIA, principal at St. Paul, Minn.-based BWBR and architect working on the Tomah Memorial project. Tomah Memorial Hospital staff and administrators have been meeting with architects and designers from BWBR and Market & Johnson of Eau Claire on specific designs for the building since early 2016.

The motivation for building a new hospital stems from the growing needs of the public, according to a hospital statement. Between the emergency room and urgent care, the hospital will likely see 16,000 people this year, with other services having tripled over the last five years, according to Tomah Memorial Hospital CEO Phil Stuart, in a statement. Since opening in 1952, the current hospital has undergone expansions in 1964, 1994 and 2004, but the location no longer allows for future growth.

“The design team’s central goal is to establish a facility for Tomah to be able to deliver healthcare for the next half century with a flexible and adaptable platform that they can work with as health care changes over time,” said Sessions.

Some of these plans include patient-centered efficiencies such as plans to double the capacity of operating rooms, expansion of emergency and urgent care areas, increasing obstetric services with additional delivery suites, the expansion of outpatient infusion services, enlarging rehabilitation areas and patient rooms, and improving efficiencies in daily workflow.

Sessions talked about Tomah being an independent hospital and how as a result they have a real focus on the wellbeing of their patients and the in-patient experience. “Nowadays, systemized hospitals have a greater focus on outpatient services, but Tomah wants to really focus on care and prevention of the hospital’s patients, in addition to becoming a known center for health and wellbeing for the greater Tomah surrounding community,” said Sessions.

There has been extensive discussion about the creation of a wellness facility that would include an indoor saltwater swimming pool available to the community (not just for patients) but is not currently part of the plans as “the economics are not there right now,” explained Sessions. While their vision for the wellness center will not yet come to fruition, progress is still being made with a saltwater pool being included in the plans for the physical therapy/rehab center. The design for the hospital also includes a walking trail around the hospital campus that may connect to Tomah’s existing recreational trail system.

Additionally, Sessions talked about the design trying to create a stress-reducing and calming environment for the patients with a simple and easy to navigate layout, complete with major landmarks to make for easy wayfinding.

“It’s hard enough just having to be at the hospital without having to worry about knowing where you are going,” Sessions said.

The design team also plans to have the patient rooms be more “backstage” so they are not on display as an effort towards more privacy and sense of calmness.

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