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The Patient Room of the Future

How does a patient experience a stay at hospital and what recommendations can be made to design a good patient room?

These were some of the questions that a major interdisciplinary study tried to answer in 2008.

Rigshospitalet is there for its patients and is therefore naturally concerned that patients are cared for when hospitalised. Accordingly, a major study of the Patient Room of the Future was carried out in 2008.

The background for the Patient Room of the Future was to create an interdisciplinary collaboration between health research, architecture, organisation and IT, and via the study learn more about how patients can achieve the best possible stay in a hospital in future.

Through four sub-projects patients, relatives and health service staff have been consulted about their needs, desires and suggestions by means of questionnaires, focus group interviews, qualitative interviews and workshops.

Recommendations for the future
The results indicate that the Patient Room of the Future is challenging. A patient room should create the framework for different patient groups - very sick patients and almost healthy patients.

Furthermore, the Patient Room of the Future must be functional for health professionals, as well as create a high degree of security for patients and health service staff.

And last but not least the Patient Room of the Future should improve patients’ comfort by means of architectural effects such as colours and natural light.

Some of the recommendations spurred by the project were that the Patient Room of the Future should create a safe environment in the patient’s everyday life at the hospital by e.g. creating a welcoming room design allowing more natural light and improving the patient’s possibility of communication through virtual networks etc., as well as strengthening the security of treatments in relation to hygiene or similar.

The recommendations will be implemented in coming redevelopment at Rigshospitalet under the Hospital Plan of the Capital Region of Denmark for 2007, and similarly, project recommendations have been published to be used by health service staff and builders in all regions of Denmark.

The study was sponsored by Realdania and organised by Arkitema Sundhed.