Places And People Can Ruin—or Make—a Patient’s Day
Consumers expect a clean, spacious and logically organized building when shopping for groceries or navigating a hotel lobby. Yet today, patients visiting healthcare settings like emergency departments and inpatient wards often encounter cramped, confusing and outdated quarters. Beyond obvious privacy and infection-control implications, inadequate physical spaces are antitherapeutic to those recovering from illness or surgery. New healthcare facilities are better designed, with private exam rooms, improved lighting, curated artwork and comfortable furniture.
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At UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts, facilities leaders removed familiar Monet and Van Gogh prints in favor of locally produced art reflecting the diverse cultural experiences of their patient population. The hospital offers selfguided healing art tours for patients and visitors.
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Designers working with the Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital partnered with Danish artist Per Arnoldi to use art to aid in touch-free wayfinding throughout the hospital.
Well-designed interactions with caregivers are as important as clean, well-lighted spaces. Some medical centers are improving patient encounters by creating new programs with an emphasis on teaching employees to be kinder and gentler with patients— training that has long been a core feature of many service industries.
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At Mass General Hospital in Boston, emergency department staff who participated in a formalized “icare” empathic communication curriculum overwhelmingly reported its usefulness in improving their practice.
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At Cleveland Clinic, the “Communicate with H.E.A.R.T.” model has been used to empower staff across the healthcare system to listen to patient complaints and communicate with compassion.
While rare today, patient experience ratings will be increasingly factored into healthcare payments. This will drive leaders to embrace the customer service side of medicine.