Nurses Organize Around the Planning Table

After a conference in 2005, a bunch of nurses got together and decided to create some reosurces to enable better input from nurses into the design of health care facilities.So they created the Nursing Institute for Healthcare Design (NISD). We have to wonder if this kind of initiative might work for other professionals with an interest in ther design of the built environment?

First of all, nurse leaders are being invited to the table, and the chief nursing officer is now considered one of the executives of the hospital. So now, instead of a director of nursing, there are chief nursing officers who are considered higher-level executives making higher-level decisions. They get to the planning table and don't have the information and preparation they need because we didn't have anything about healthcare construction in nursing school.

Through the online resource they can be inspired by knowing that there are nurses out there who are knowledgeable and could be a resource on this subject. “NIHD Connect” is where we pull together basic healthcare design and construction information—articles, videos, books, and links—we find about such topics as patient room design, hospital unit design, noise in the work place, and safety features. A lot of those design features deal with patient safety and infection control. You know, my mother knows you should put the sink by the door, but is this being done everywhere? So by reading some of this basic information about healthcare design and construction, the nurse leader will be equipped so she or he at least knows what to advocate for at the planning table. Or, if something doesn't ring true, they know where to go and dig deeper into the topic.

Oberlin: Where does the nurse-designer collaboration process need improvement?

Hayes: I think architects still have a tendency to discount the nurses' views, and sometimes that is because the nurses may not be giving the best answers. For example, I might ask a nurse at one hospital and they might tell me one thing, and then I ask a nurse at another hospital and she tells me the complete opposite. So if the architects are not getting good answers from the nurses, they may decide not to pay attention to them and only include them as a courtesy. And the problem may be that the nurses are telling them different things because of the way they are using the space or because of a lack of knowledge that, yes, you do need to put the sinks by the door.