Patient and Circular Pod Design

1. There are many variables that a hospital needs to consider in layout design. First, there should be enough rooms and equipment like hospital beds for the patients and their visitor. The visitors of the patients must have enough space to stay or wait for their love ones. The efficiency of meals and supplies delivery is also taken into account, it should be delivered warm and on time. Secondly, the layout should provide enough space for information to flow fluently from the doctors to the nurses to the patients and vice-versa. Thirdly, the layout should minimize the cost of moving between various work areas to ease the access of employees to such areas and thus, increasing employee efficiency in providing more services for the patients. And lastly, the hospital should consider environment and aesthetics, environment because the building should be easily accessed by emergency vehicles for emergency purposes and aesthetics to provide the place with ambient condition for the patient to have a comfortable feeling. The rooms must provide serenity and peace for the patient to rest better. The layout should always be customer friendly for the convenience of the patients and visitors.
2. The traditional “racetrack” or linear hallway layout is not so favorable today in considering the efficiency of limited and expensive resources. The advantages of the circular pod design over the traditional is that there is an easy access of information, putting the nurses’ pod in the center lessens the time to pass on information from patient to nurses to doctors and vice-versa. It increases the nurse’s efficiency by shortening the time to reach each room to provide services. This not only saves travel time and walking or running exhaustion, but is more medically efficient when staff have a view of each room at all times. The circular pod design is easier to prove security because the room can easily be seen from the pod. The visitors will also have shorter time to find the rooms