New Riverview Hospital, Providing a "Low Cost" Hospital for Detroit

Abstract

What can you do with healthcare architecture that meets the demands for the present day? What are the trends within the healthcare field itself that will lead to a future model for healthcare architecture? Will the hospital of today, advanced as it may be, be completely different from the hospital of tomorrow? What is happening to older hospitals? Can they be reused to form the hospital of tomorrow or are they too obsolete to face such changes? What is happening to the hospitals of the inner cities across the United States? Mainly why are hospitals closing their services to the populations of people that they are there to serve? Who is most affected by these and other trends? These topics are vast indeed, yet are all related to a specific problem that the healthcare industry is facing. To focus all the above questions into a logical article, intent on addressing one particular problem, one must step back and examine each question individually so that a final conclusion or solution may be reached. The problem that is intended on being addressed is that major hospitals are closing down within regions where the access to healthcare facilities is just as important as the quality of care received by a patient. These regions show explicit need for healthcare and these closings are typically occurring within major cities across the United States. The main cause behind these closings is simple, the hospitals are loosing more money than they are making. The healthcare profession is ever changing. It can be argued that no other profession has seen as much change in the last 200 years. With each new advance in medical science come unique changes in the very architecture of healthcare facilities. Architects are constantly adapting to these advances. One brief example involves miasma: the belief that stagnant air causes infection and illness in patients. Through experimentation with natural ventilation, healthcare workers found that patient infections and illnesses dropped. Therefore, architects began to incorporate this ventilation into healthcare buildings. There are many general and specific ways that architects can meet the needs of the healthcare industry. In the book Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System For the 21st Century, The Institute of Medicine Committee on Quality Health Care in America states that healthcare should be safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient and equitable. The role of the architect in this process is vital to meeting these requirements. Architects must realize the important role they play in developing the Hospital of the 21st century. They cannot simply design for architecture’s sake, but for the benefit of the industry itself, as well as for patients and employees. Architects should remember that the healthcare profession is always changing and that their designs need to be adaptive and always have room to grow, change, and be updated. Because healthcare markets are competitive and cutthroat, yet nonprofit, architects also need to consider their healthcare client’s bottom line, striving to offer the best hospital that is affordable while saving the client money where possible. This can be done in many ways, such as using innovative design techniques that can reduce infections or injuries, or by using green design techniques to help reduce the life cycle cost of running a hospital. Yet green design should never be an end in and of itself, but should be used only when it can benefit the industry in some way. Of course, hospital designs should always be clean, cohesive, intelligent, and well organized. But architects can take their designs so much further by developing an understanding of patients. By looking through a patient’s eyes, an architect can design the most stress free environment possible, which really helps the hospital become a thriving business within today’s competitive market. By designing for patients’ sake, architects can make a difference in the everyday lives of people seeking wellness as well as the people providing their treatment.